United States

In the United States, continental distance becomes a problem of connection and timing: the Pacific Railroad links the Pacific coast to Omaha, while onward trains carry Phileas Fogg’s party toward New York. The country’s immense scale is made traversable by modern rail, but the route’s fragile bridges, exposed interior, and tightly timed transfers show that speed depends on infrastructure that can still fail.

A continent joined by rail

The Pacific Railroad is described not as one uniform line but as two joined systems: the Central Pacific Railroad runs between San Francisco and Ogden, and the Union Pacific Railroad continues from Ogden to Omaha. Five main lines connect Omaha with New York. Together, the railways form an uninterrupted metal route of 3,786 miles between San Francisco and New York, a measurement that turns the country’s breadth into a single itinerary while also making clear the scale of the distance being crossed.

The account sets this network against an earlier measure of travel. Under the most favorable conditions, the journey from New York to San Francisco had once taken at least six months; by rail it could now be completed in seven days. That comparison makes speed a historical transformation as well as a practical convenience. The trip is no longer an expedition measured in seasons, but a sequence of connections whose success depends on trains continuing to run and passengers reaching each point in time.

The railway’s construction is given a similarly concrete scale. In 1862, after debate over a more southerly route, the line was assigned a course between the forty-first and forty-second parallels, and President Lincoln fixed Omaha as its eastern terminus. Work advanced across the prairies at a reported rate of a mile and a half a day. A locomotive brought rails for the next day’s work over track laid the evening before, so that construction itself moved forward along the line it was creating. The rapid progress is presented as an achievement, but it also emphasizes how recently this continental connection had been made.

The exposed interior

Between Omaha and the Pacific, the route crosses territory the narrative describes as inhabited by Indigenous people and wild animals, as well as a broad region colonized by settlers associated with Mormonism after their expulsion from Illinois in 1845. These details place the railway within a landscape that is not simply empty ground awaiting connection. The account nevertheless frames the region chiefly through the conditions it poses for railway travel: settlement, wildlife, and danger are registered from the moving passenger’s route.

The train’s halt at a red signal near Medicine Bow exposes the limits of the network’s promise. A signal-man reports that the suspension bridge ahead is unsafe and cannot bear the train’s weight. Several iron wires have broken, leaving the crossing in a ruinous condition; the danger is serious enough that passage is refused. The delay follows not from a failure of the schedule on paper but from the material state of the bridge. The railway can span great distances only where its structures remain sound.

Crossing from Omaha to the Atlantic

Omaha serves as the Pacific Railroad’s terminus and a transfer point toward the eastern United States. When Phileas Fogg and his party arrive, they have no time to see the town: a train is ready to leave, and they board it immediately. The route runs across Iowa by Council Bluffs, Des Moines, and Iowa City; during the night it crosses the Mississippi at Davenport and enters Illinois by way of Rock Island.

The party reaches Chicago at four in the afternoon on December 10. The city is described as having risen from its ruins and standing again on the shore of Lake Michigan. Nine hundred miles remain between Chicago and New York, but the account stresses that trains are available for the next leg. Phileas Fogg transfers at once to another service, which speeds through Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. The journey’s pace is conveyed through this rapid succession of states and towns, until the Hudson River appears and the train reaches the New York station at 11:15 p.m. on December 11.

That arrival is fast, but not fast enough for the planned connection. The China, the steamer for Liverpool, has departed forty-five minutes earlier. The missed ship makes visible the difference between crossing the United States and completing the whole journey: even a successful rail passage cannot recover time lost elsewhere in the route. With nine days and thirteen hours remaining before the wager’s deadline, Phileas Fogg searches the Hudson River waterfront for a vessel preparing to sail. The port offers departures in many directions, but most of the ships he finds are sailing vessels and therefore of no use to him.

Delay, improvisation, and narrative function

The United States itinerary repeatedly tests the assumption that a continuous railway guarantees continuous movement. At the Medicine Bow bridge, safety requires the train to stop; after the Sioux raiders interrupt the journey, Phileas Fogg is told that the party is twenty hours behind and must regain eight hours. A proposed sledge with sails offers an alternative to the railway. The route thus turns on the ability to shift between systems of movement, rather than on rail speed alone.

The country’s narrative significance lies in this tension between vast distance and compressed travel time. Its railways make a journey once reckoned in months possible in days, and the west-to-east crossing can be followed through named towns, rivers, states, and transfers. Yet the red signal at a broken bridge and the missed steamer at New York puncture the fantasy of seamless motion. The United States is both the terrain that the new network conquers and the place where its limits become consequential: a delay measured in hours can decide whether the larger journey remains possible.