The Railroad Builders | Page 8

on the New York Central, he had to import the
new material from England. In the Civil War period, practically all
American railroads were single track fines--and this alone prevented
any extensive traffic. Vanderbilt laid two tracks along the Hudson
River from New York to Albany, and four from Albany to Buffalo, two
exclusively for freight and two for passengers. By 1880 the American

railroad, in all its essential details, had definitely arrived.
But in this same period even more sensational developments had taken
place. Soon after 1865 the imagination of the American railroad builder
began to reach far beyond the old horizon. Up to that time the
Mississippi River had marked the Western railroad terminus. Now and
then a road straggled beyond this barrier for a few miles into eastern
Iowa and Missouri; but in the main the enormous territory reaching
from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean was crossed only by the old
trails. The one thing which perhaps did most to place the
transcontinental road on a practical basis was the annexation of
California in 1848; and the wild rush that took place on the discovery
of the gold fields one year later had led Americans to realize that on the
Pacific coast they had an empire which was great and incalculably rich
but almost inaccessible. The loyalty of California to the Northern cause
in the war naturally stimulated a desire for closer contact. In the ten
years preceding 1860 the importance of a transcontinental line had
constantly been brought to the attention of Congress and the project
had caused much jealousy between the North and the South, for each
region desired to control its Eastern terminus. This impediment no
longer stood in the way; early in his term, therefore, President Lincoln
signed the bill authorizing the construction of the Union Pacific--a
name doubly significant, as marking the union of the East and the West
and also recognizing the sentiment of loyalty or union that this great
enterprise was intended to promote. The building of this railroad, as
well as that of the others which ultimately made the Pacific and the
Atlantic coast near neighbors--the Santa Fe, the Southern Pacific, the
Northern Pacific, and the Great Northern--is described in the pages that
follow. Here it is sufficient to emphasize the fact that they achieved the
concluding triumph in what is certainly the most extensive system of
railroads in the world. These transcontinental roads really completed
the work of Columbus. He sailed to discover the western route to
Cathay and found that his path was blocked by a mighty continent. But
the first train that crossed the plains and ascended the Rockies and
reached the Golden Gate assured thenceforth a rapid and uninterrupted
transit westward from Europe to Asia.

CHAPTER II

. THE COMMODORE AND THE NEW YORK CENTRAL
A story was told many years ago of Commodore Vanderbilt which,
while perhaps not strictly true, was pointed enough to warrant its
constant repetition for more than two generations. Back in the sixties,
when this grizzled railroad chieftain was the chief factor in the rapidly
growing New York Central Railroad system, whose backbone then
consisted of a continuous one-track line connecting Albany with the
Great Lakes, the president of a small cross-country road approached
him one day and requested an exchange of annual passes.
"Why, my dear sir," exclaimed the Commodore, "my railroad is more
than three hundred miles long, while yours is only seventeen miles."
"That may all be so," replied the other, "but my railroad is just as wide
as yours."
This statement was true. Practically no railroad, even as late as the
sixties, was wider than another. They were all single-tracked lines.
Even the New York Central system in 1866 was practically a
single-track road; and the Commodore could not claim to any particular
superiority over his neighbors and rivals in this particular. Instead of
sneering at his "seventeen-mile" colleague, Vanderbilt might have
remembered that his own fine system had grown up in less than two
generations from a modest narrow-gage track running from "nothing to
nowhere." The Vanderbilt lines, which today with their controlled and
affiliated systems comprise more than 13,000 miles of railroad--a large
portion of which is double-tracked, no mean amount being laid with
third and fourth tracks is the outgrowth of a little seventeen-mile line,
first chartered in 1826, and finished for traffic in 1831. This little
railroad was known as the Mohawk and Hudson, and it extended from
Albany to Schenectady. It was the second continuous section of
railroad line operated by steam in the United States, and on it the third
locomotive built in America, the De Witt Clinton, made a satisfactory
trial trip in August, 1831.
The success of this experiment created a sensation far and wide and led
to