Students in Kayse Fernandes’s fourth-grade class used to ignore the railroad tracks that run next to the freeway and along the outskirts of their city. If they did think about them, they figured they were just an old-fashioned way to get from one place to another.
But after researching, writing and illustrating a graphic novel about the colossal effort it took to build the nation’s first railroad to link the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, these kids at Horace Mann Elementary in Utah are bursting with information and awe.
They can tell you who paid for the railroads and how laborers used gunpowder to blast through mountains inch by inch, losing body parts and lives in the process.