Like everything else in its path, the railroad brought a level of predictability once rare in the nineteenth century. Engineering achievements helped to ensure efficient and safe operations of trains year around. Sweaty construction crews sliced through and transformed thousands of miles of uneven terrain with precisely aligned cuts and fills. Railroads built stations, roundhouses, switching yards, and other support structures. Nothing was left to chance. Everything from the roadbed to the locomotives was precisely engineered. Close enough was no longer good enough in the West the railroads made.

Something so simple as the space between rails could not vary by more than a fraction of an inch, or the locomotives and cars would derail. With few exceptions, the transcontinental lines maintained a standard gauge of four feet eight and one half inch.

Careful measurement was only one example of an industry’s desire for standardization. Eventually, everything from paper thickness to envelope size in railroad offices was standardized.

The passion for precision extended even to uniforms worn by passenger train employees. The Northern Pacific, for instance, published a guide about employee dress. The company manual said "no deviation from quality specification or color or cloth. . . will be permitted." Employees "must wear clean white linen (shirts, collars, cuffs); and shoes must be kept polished. Those who wear beards or mustaches must keep them neatly trimmed, otherwise must be cleanly shaven."

Standardization was appearing in all of American life. It began earlier in the century with interchangeable parts for firearms. But it soon spread to everything from tin cans and window frames to shoe sizes and rolls of barbed wire. The railroad, with its standard track gauge, required goods of common sizes. At the simplest level that meant wrenches that fit bolt heads, steam gages marked in the same scale, and rails of predictable length and weight. In all of this the message was clear. The who-knows-what-comes-next West had to make way for a machine-made West that required uniformity and predictability.