First Transcontinental Railroad — Truckee

The plaque says the Sierra was conquered and names nobody. The crews who bored the summit tunnel and laid forty miles of track out of this town were overwhelmingly Chinese, and Truckee spent the following twenty years getting rid of them. In 1886 the newspaper editor C. F. McGlashan organised a boycott of every Chinese business and every employer of Chinese labour, advertised it as lawful and nonviolent, and toured the state selling it. Other towns copied it. They called it the Truckee Method.

What the plaque says

While construction on Sierra tunnels delayed Central Pacific, advance forces at Truckee began building forty miles of track east and west of Truckee moving all supplies by wagon and sled. Summit Tunnel was opened in December, 1867. The line reached Truckee April 3, 1868, and the Sierra was conquered. Rails reached Reno June 19 and construction advanced eastward one mile daily toward the meeting with Union Pacific at Promontory May 10, 1869, to complete the first Transcontinental Railroad.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Donner Memorial State Park — 2.5 mi
  Where the Donner Party spent the winter of 1846, marked by cabin stone and a monument built to a remembered snow depth.
• Donner Summit Tunnels — 7.6 mi
  Granite bored by hand at fourteen inches a day, by Chinese crews the country spent a century forgetting.
• Sand Harbor — 16 mi
  The crown of Lake Tahoe's Nevada shore—car-sized granite boulders standing in water so clear the boats above them seem to float on air, on a beach the Washoe kept for thousands of summers
• The Flume Trail & Marlette Lake — 19 mi
  The other thing the Comstock took off Lake Tahoe—not its trees but its water, hauled over a mountain range through the highest-pressure pipeline on earth, on a flume grade that is now one of the country's great mountain-bike rides

More markers nearby

• Donner Monument — 2.5 mi
• The Great Incline of the Sierra Nevada — 15 mi
• Mount Rose Weather Observatory — 15 mi
• Sand Harbor — 16 mi