MODERN MARVELS: THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD,(A&E Television Networks, $19.95).
Dreams and struggles, competition and scandals are the inspiration for this video account of the building of one of the country’s engineering wonders–the transcontinental railroad. The film’s features include historic photographs and motion-picture footage, as well as interviews with historians and the director of Sacramento’s California State Railroad Museum. In the middle of the nineteenth century, those heading across the untamed West for California had two dangerous and time-consuming options; they could travel overland by horse, stagecoach, or wagon, or they could embark on a long ocean voyage from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. In 1861, engineer and railroad builder Theodore Dehone Judah (1826-63) joined with financiers to create the Central Pacific Railroad Company. Working eastward from Sacramento, California, the Central Pacific cut its way through the mountains to Promontory, Utah, where, on May 10, 1869,its rails linked up with those of the Union Pacific Railroad, which had laid its roadbed westward from Omaha, Nebraska.
