As a result of these new conditions, the States, cities, and towns were welded together, and population and prosperity increased rapidly in those inland sections which had formerly languished because they had no means of easy and rapid communication.
The nation did not begin to realize the extraordinary possibilities of the vast Western territory until its attention was thus suddenly and definitely concentrated on the Pacific by the annual addition of over fifty million dollars to the circulating medium.
The Pennsylvania was the first American railroad to lay steel rails and the first to lay Bessemer rails; it was the first to put the steel fire-box under the locomotive boiler; it was the first to use the air brake and the block signal system; it was the first to use in its shops the overhead crane.
When business revived in the closing years of the nineteenth century, the history of American railroads began a new chapter.
In fact there were railroads long before there were steam engines or locomotives.
In the United States three new methods of transportation made their appearance at almost the same time-the steamboat, the canal boat, and the rail car.
It was a simple matter to find fault with the railroad; it has always been its fate to arouse the opposition of the farmers.
The development of railroad properties under the Vanderbilt influence was not confined to the territory east of Chicago and the Mississippi Valley.
By this time Vanderbilt had achieved a great reputation as a man who created values, earned dividends, and invented wealth as if by magic; other railroad managers now began... ask him to do with them what he had done with the Harlem and the Hudson River.
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