nelius Vanderbilt substituted steel for iron
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 worl