If you want a job done right, don't ask a liberal to do it. Need proof????

It makes me proud to know our forefathers 160 years ago could build a railroad that is 125% longer, 98.9% cheaper, and completed 78.1% faster than what modern Californians can build today. This adds a new meaning of go woke, go broke!

Cheap Chinese and Irish labor helped a bit, too.

Exactly. My Irish ancestors were treated like crap. Where's my reparations?

Even if you go with standard wages of the time for all workers, that's still 50% cheaper

I agree. The high speed rail in CA is a money hole that will NEVER be profitable. If it were being built and owned by a private company that has to make a profit, it would never be built. But it's the government and they don't have to turn a profit.

Gavin approached…

Just goes to show how the government is funneling money to contractor schemes.

They were doing it then, too. Just on a smaller scale.

Using present day American labor is expensive. Employers have to cover benefits and higher wages than back then.

I don't think that can fully account for the discrepancies between then and now.

Here in Taxifornia, we have incompetence and fraud (in govt and private industry) on a scale so massive that it probably couldn't have even been conceived of back then.

That's part of the reason I moved out of CA.
With that, the almost 24 hour gridlock on the roads, and the spiraling cost of living, the decision to leave was pretty easy to make.

Sounds like an economic issue.

You’re confused. Blacks were not the majority laborers for the transcontinental railroad. Many various ethnic groups Caucasian, black and Asian built it. F the Chinese performing the labor in some of the most dangerous sections.

They worked at the lumber mills, the iron mills, the plantations (farms) that fed the rail roads, they worked to transport materials. They may not have been that prevalent on the line or the field but they were the backbone of the southern states economy.

They were not solely responsible for any of it. They made direct contribution as did many other groups. In some areas their contribution was greater than others but they were not any better than any other contributors that built this nation. The conditions of their contribution were more agregious in the southern plantations because it was coerced.

I never said they were solely responsible, but it was because of the way they were used that contributed greatly to the differential of cost for such large projects. The premise here is that the cost of building a railroad was cheap and fast in 1862 and that includes all the out lying conditions. At the time they didn't have the demography of today or an established society, and let's not forget law and law enforcement was pretty much nonexistent compared to today's status quo, also it was for the most part raw land owned by the government.

The truth is it was cheap and fast for all the reasons cited but also because there was less beauracracy and more common sense. The leftist promotion that blacks built this country is not truth. They helped, they contributed but many groups contributed as much and are no less responsible for building this country and exaggerating contributions at the expense of all the other peoples is just as bad as denying them. White people can’t claim to have solely built this country and neither can blacks. The reality is we are a conglomeration of groups who have contributed since this countries inception. It’s what makes us unique and special among nations.

There is no way to reason there was more common sense. And there is no leftist agenda making people think black people built the country, but it was white people building on the backs of slaves and immigrants and displacing aboriginals that got in the way. Down playing the way it was done, shows the guilt people feel for how they got to where they are.

Certainly there is. No one then wasted time on trying to decide what bathroom to use or what pronouns to demand everyone else should call them. They simply did things. They said we want to get a train from here to here so we need to lay track.

There is certainly a leftist agenda to promote that blacks built america epitomized by your slipping in that black slaves built the transcontinental railroad. No they didn’t. The assumption that all white people just sat around with slaves doing everything is the biggest absurdity ever heard. Did immigrants take the lower paying more dangerous jobs? Yes they did just like they did in every other country that had immigrants or other minority ethnicities. Non Chinese didn’t do as well as Chinese in China, non Mexicans didn’t do as well in Mexico, East Asians still have a caste system that has existed for centuries. The difference is that in America those groups became assimilated and rose to hold high office and sit in positions of power, unlike every other country mentioned. Villainizing white americans is a leftist agenda and it is displayed routinely.

No one then wasted time on trying to decide what bathroom to use because the world was their toilet!

Haha, even in the times of knights it was considered bad manners to drop a load upon the road others travelled on.