More financial difficulties followed. The government bonds only paid half the bill. No one private would invest because it would take too long for the investment to pay off. Both railroads engaged in some creative financing to cover their costs.
The Central Pacific reached Newcastle on June 4, 1864. But from that point on, it was a long haul up the Sierra. Deep fills, switchback routes, high trestles, huge rock cuts, and 15 tunnels were necessary to make it over the Sierras. They also had to build 37 miles of wooden snow sheds to keep the train going through. The Central Pacific had to ship their supplies and tools around Cape Horn. Each mile of track required 100 tons of rail, about 2,500 ties, and two or three tons of spikes and fish plates (metal pieces that joined the rails and prevented climatic expansion and contraction of the metal). Other tools needed were wheelbarrows, horse drawn scrapers, two-wheel dump carts, shovels, axes, crowbars, blasting powder, quarry tools, and iron rods. Then there were the locomotives, wheel trucks, switch mechanisms, foundry tools needed. The Union Pacific had a little easier because supplies could be sailed up the Missouri or brought in by wagon. When the Chicago & Western railroad to Council Bluffs was completed in November 1867, supplies arrived from that direction. However, it was difficult for the Union Pacific to get railroad ties, since there were few natural trees like there were in the Sierras. They had to import them until the line reached the Black Hills of Wyoming and the Wasatch Mountains of Utah.
In January 1865, Chinese were hired to work on the Central Pacific to replace some strikers. Hiring Chinese crews became even more necessary because white workers kept abandoning the line when news of each new mining boom reached them. At first, construction superintendent J. H. Strobridge resisted hiring them, insisting they were "too puny" for heavy
