Hell on Wheels: how many episodes are in season 5? The final count comes with a catch

So how many episodes are there in season 5?

14 episodes. Seven aired in the summer of 2015, seven in the summer of 2016. One season, two calendar years.

How the split worked

• Part 1 (episodes 1–7) — premiered July 18, 2015, following Cullen Bohannon west to Truckee, California, and the Central Pacific's brutal push through the Sierra Nevada with its Chinese workforce.
• Part 2 (episodes 8–14) — billed as The Final Episodes, premiered June 11, 2016, and drove the story toward the meeting of the rails.
• The finale — "Done," aired July 23, 2016, closing the series at 57 episodes across five seasons.

Why AMC split it

The network was following its own proven playbook. AMC had already stretched the final seasons of Breaking Bad and Mad Men across two calendar years, keeping a flagship drama on the schedule twice for the price of one final order. Hell on Wheels got the same treatment — which is why the episode guide says "season 5" but the wait between episode 7 and episode 8 lasted nearly eleven months.

For viewers streaming it today, none of that matters. It plays as one continuous 14-episode run.

How it ends

The show gets its trains to Promontory Summit, Utah, where the transcontinental railroad was joined on May 10, 1869. Thomas Durant is hauled before Congress to answer for the railroad's financial scheming, and Bohannon — offered respectable futures on all sides — turns them down and boards a ship for China instead, chasing the one person left who matters to him.

Total watch time

Episodes run about 42 minutes, so the final season is roughly ten hours. The full series, all 57 episodes, comes to around 40 — four seasons of build and one long, split-in-half goodbye.

For the record: the real transcontinental railroad took six years to build. The show about it took five.