Sketch titled "Railroad building on the plains."

Grenville Dodge wrote in How We Built the Union Pacific Railway, "To supply one mile of track with material and supplies required about forty cars, as on the plains everything – rails, ties, bridging, fastenings, all railway supplies, fuel for locomotives and trains, and supplies for men and animals on the entire work – had to be transported from the Missouri River. Therefore, as we moved westward, every hundred miles added vastly to our transportation. Yet the work was so systematically planned and executed that I do not remember an instant in all the construction of the line of the work being delayed a single week for want of material."