The Railroad Builders | Page 7

was the first man to
appreciate the fact that these two methods of transportation were about
to change places--that water transportation was to decline and that rail
transportation was to gain the ascendancy. It was about 1865 that
Vanderbilt acted on this farsighted conviction, promptly sold out his

steamboats for what they would bring, and began buying railroads
despite the fact that his friends warned him that, in his old age, he was
wrecking the fruits of a hard and thrifty life. But Vanderbilt perceived
what most American business men of the time failed to see, that a
change had come over the railroad situation as a result of the Civil War.
The time extending from 1860 to about 1875 marks the second stage in
the railroad activity of the United States. The characteristic of this
period is the development of the great trunk lines and the construction
of a transcontinental route to the Pacific. The Civil War ended the
supremacy of the Mississippi River as the great transportation route of
the West. The fact that this river ran through hostile
territory--Vicksburg did not fall until July 4, 1863--forced the farmers
of the West to find another outlet for their products. By this time the
country from Chicago and St. Louis eastward to the Atlantic ports was
fairly completely connected by railroads. The necessities of war led to
great improvements in construction and equipment. Business which
had hitherto gone South now began to go East; New Orleans ceased to
be the great industrial entrepot of this region and gave place to St.
Louis and Chicago.
Yet, though this great change in traffic routes took place in the course
of the war, the actual consolidations of the various small railroads into
great trunk lines did not begin until after peace had been assured. The
establishment of five great railroads extending continuously from the
Atlantic seaboard to Chicago and the West was perhaps the most
remarkable economic development of the ten or fifteen years
succeeding the war. By 1875 these five great trunk lines, the New York
Central, the Pennsylvania, the Erie, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the
Grand Trunk, had connected their scattered units and established
complete through systems.
All the vexations that had necessarily accompanied railroad traffic in
the days when each one these systems had been a series of
disconnected roads had disappeared. The grain and meat products of
the West, accumulating for the most part at Chicago and St. Louis, now
came rapidly and uninterruptedly to the Atlantic seaboard, and railroad
passengers, no longer submitted to the inconveniences of the Civil War
period, now began to experience for the first time the pleasures of
railroad travel. Together with the articulation of the routes, important

mechanical changes and reconstruction programmes completely
transformed the American railroad system. The former haphazard
character of each road is evidenced by the fact that in Civil War days
there were eight different gages, with the result that it was almost
impossible for the rolling stock of one line to use another. A few years
after the Civil War, however, the present standard gage of four feet
eight and one-half inches had become uniform all over the United
States. The malodorous "eating cribs" of the fifties and the sixties--little
station restaurants located at selected spots along the line--now began
to disappear, and the modern dining car made its appearance. The old
rough and ready sleeping cars began to give place to the modern
Pullman. One of the greatest drawbacks to ante-bellum travel had been
the absence of bridges across great rivers, such as the Hudson and the
Susquehanna. At Albany, for example, the passengers in the summer
time were ferried across, and in winter they were driven in sleighs or
were sometimes obliged to walk across the ice. It was not until after the
Civil War that a great iron bridge, two thousand feet long, was
constructed across the Hudson at this point. On the trains the little
flickering oil lamps now gave place to gas, and the wood burning
stoves--frequently in those primitive days smeared with tobacco
juice--in a few years were displaced by the new method of heating by
steam.
The accidents which had been almost the prevailing rule in the fifties
and sixties were greatly reduced by the Westinghouse air-brake,
invented in 1868, and the block signaling system, introduced somewhat
later. In the ten years succeeding the Civil War, the physical
appearance of the railroads entirely changed; new and larger
locomotives were made, the freight cars, which during the period of the
Civil War had a capacity of about eight tons, were now built to carry
fifteen or twenty. The former little flimsy iron rails were taken up and
were relaid with steel. In the early seventies when Cornelius Vanderbilt
substituted steel for iron