I don't know if this is the train that came through Gibson Co, but probably was, but here is a reference I found in a little booklet on Columbus, KY by a CJ Custer. "The Mobile and Ohio railroad, starting from Mobile in 1852, was built to Columbus. That ws before the invention of the steam-shovel and the pile-driver. Irish-men with picks and shovels and Irishmen with wheelbarrows built that road, and its trestle piling rested upon whiteoak mud-sills. And when it was completed and opened from Columbus to Mobile on April 22, 1861, it was teh longest railroad under one management in the world. Years later when the Mobile and Ohio was laid with steel rails purchased from Sheffield, England, it was the first railroad on the Western Hemisphere to have steel rails. the other roads had iron rails." Sorry, no info on east west but if I recall my American history, the cross country railroad to California was begun in 1859 but had to be delayed until after the Civil War to be completed due to the war.