Did the building of railroads change the environment of the west?

It was—and remains—a marvel of planning and construction. When the highway route across the West was built decades later, it followed the path broken by the rail.

Of course, breaking that path and laying the track required tremendous resources. In the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, the federal government not only granted huge amounts of land to the railroad companies (in alternating sections along the track), but it also ceded the resources on the route. As with the land, trackside timber, water, and minerals could be extracted, processed, or sold as the railroads saw fit. This had huge environmental consequences. By the late 1860s, the California State Board of Agriculture estimated that one-third of the state's forests had already disappeared, and much of that had gone to the railroads (the rest went largely to mining).

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