USA: Chinese workers greet a train on a snowy day on the Central Pacific Railroad in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. From a sketch by Joesph Becker, 6 February 1870

The manual labor to build the Central Pacific's roadbed, bridges and tunnels was done primarily by many thousands of emigrant workers from China under the direction of skilled non-Chinese supervisors. The Chinese were commonly referred to at the time as 'Celestials' and China as the 'Celestial Kingdom'.

Labor-saving devices in those days consisted primarily of wheelbarrows, horse or mule pulled carts, and a few railroad pulled gondolas. The construction work involved an immense amount of manual labor.

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