You think the Internet revolutionized information transmission? So now you can check your personal stock portfolio from your laptop while you wait for a latte at Starbucks. Big deal.

For a truly revolutionary breakthrough in information technology check out the Transcontinental Railroad, nearly 2,000 miles of iron rail that put the united in United States. The Civil War held together North and South, but the railroad, engineered and built in just six years by Union and Confederate soldiers alike, forever joined East and West.

"It was the railroads that served as the symbol of nineteenth century revolution in technology," Stephen Ambrose writes in Nothing Like It in the World. "The locomotive was the greatest thing of the age. With it man conquered space and time."

Before the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads met in Promontory, Utah, if you wanted to travel from New York to San Francisco, you could brave the stormy waters around the tip of South America or attempt a crossing of the disease-plagued Panamanian isthmus. Either way it would cost you more than $1,000 and six months of your life -- if you lived.

After the railroad was finished, your trip across the continent could be accomplished in five days at a cost of $150 for a first-class sleeper.

"So fast, they used to say, "that you don't even have time to take a bath,' " Ambrose writes.

Before the railroad, localities set their own time. Railroad schedules required agreement. Hence, four times zones and something called "standard time."

The telegraph lines followed the railroad right of way, permitting a rapidity of information transmission that permitted a nationwide stock market.

Given the profound effects the railroad would have on the growth of America and how essential it would seem in hindsight, it is more than a little sobering to learn how little agreement there was at the time about how or even whether to build it.

Even before the Civil War began, Southern states pushed for a route from New Orleans to San Diego. Northern politicians could not abide the idea that such a potentially lucrative venture would pass through slave-owning states. Of course, no Southern politician would agree to Minneapolis or Chicago as the eastern terminus.

Ultimately, President Abraham Lincoln chose a central line, beginning in Omaha, Neb., and following the Platte River. The terminus became Sacramento, Calif., a choice that was made not for geographic reasons as much as because that is where Theodore Judah, who incorporated the Central Pacific Railroad Co. in 1860, found his financial backers; businessmen in San Francisco scoffed at his plan to cross the Sierra Nevadas.

In 1862, the federal government passed a bill that enabled the creation of a second railroad company, the Union Pacific, that would build west from Omaha while the Central Pacific built east from Sacramento. The bill gave the companies rights of way of 200 feet on either side of the road and financial aid in the form of government bonds (ranging in value from $16,000 to $48,000) for each mile of approved track.

Once the track-laying began in earnest in 1865, the American public, thirsty for a big story to equal the Civil War, seized on the race to the middle. No one cared which company won, only that the railroad got built quickly.

"It was indeed such an American thing to do. A race, a competition. Build it fast," Ambrose writes. "The company that won would get the largest share of the land and the biggest share of the bonds. . . . That was democracy at work."

The race seemed lopsided at best in the beginning. The Union Pacific had flat terrain and covered several miles a day. The Central Pacific had to confront the Sierra Nevada.

No one had ever attempted to run train track over a mountain range, much less drill tunnels through a mountain. Engineers of the time ridiculed the enterprise. Thousands of Chinese immigrants proved them wrong.

Working three shifts around the clock, Chinese men hand-drilled holes into which they packed black powder and later nitroglycerine. The progress in the tunnels was staggeringly slow -- an average of one foot a day.

These were the same men California Gov. Leland Stanford had called the scourge of America, actively campaigning to shut down Chinese immigration. Once he realized they were the only men who would build his railroad, he sent envoys to China to encourage immigration.

All this makes Ambrose, an avowed populist, rather grandiose in his admiration for the men who surveyed the routes and swung the sledgehammers. If there is a flaw to the book, it is his tendency to repeat gauzy pronouncements such as, "What the (Central Pacific) crews did that day will be remembered as long as this republic lasts."

Of course, Ambrose was writing about a day that eight Irishmen, supported by hundreds of other workers, laid 10 miles of track, each man hoisting a cumulative 125 tons of iron. Not quite the same as typing up an initial public offering for some dot-com start-up.

Ambrose is just as clear about his lack of interest in rehashing the scandals that plagued the two railroad companies for years after the golden spike was pounded.

Yes, Ambrose writes, the owners of the Union Pacific paid themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock dividends, using the government bonds that should have paid their laborers. But Ambrose gives the owners of the two companies, slick and unethical as some of them clearly were, credit for taking grave personal financial risk to begin the enterprise.

One more thing. The railroads turned a profit immediately, something hundreds of tech stocks have yet to accomplish even as their stock prices soar. Maybe you can order the book on-line while you're waiting for your latte.

- Bill Duryea is a Times staff writer.

NOTHING LIKE IT IN THE WORLD:

The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869

By Stephen E. Ambrose

Simon and Schuster, $28.

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