sconnected
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 Cor