ilways had doubled. So had the weight of the freight-car load and
the amount of freight which an engine could pull. The newest locomotives
weighed nearly or quite one hundred tons each.

In 1869 a submarine cable was laid which joined the United States to the
continent of Europe. It extended about 3,050 miles, from Duxbury, Mass.,
to Brest, France, via the Island of St. Pierre, south of Newfoundland.
The company owning the cable was chartered by the waning empire of Louis
Napoleon. In 1875 a new cable was stretched between the United States
and Great Britain. It was called the United States Direct Cable, and at
first operated in opposition to the original one. The rates for cable
messages were greatly reduced in consequence. The price, once ten
dollars a word, fell in anticipation of the competition to fifty cents,
and to twenty-five after the competition actually began. The two
Anglo-American lines were subsequently united.

[Illustration: Portrait.]
Cornelius Vanderbilt.

[1863-1869]

The year 1869 witnessed the junction of the Union Pacific with the
Central Pacific Railway, forming a continuous railway line between the
Atlantic and Pacific shores. The last rail was put down on May 12th, and
on the 15th trains began to run. This work had been in process of
construction ever since 1863. It traversed the Rocky Mountain range at
an elevation of 8,243 feet above sea-level. The Northern Pacific Railway
Company was chartered by Congress in 1864. The road was not completed
till August, 1883, nor opened to traffic before September. Its length
from Duluth to its then terminus on the Columbia River, Washington, was
1,674 miles. The Southern Pacific and the Atlantic and Pacific, both
traversing the Rockies, soon followed. Still another line, the Great
Northern, connecting St. Paul with the extreme Northwest, was opened in
1893. The country's total railway mileage in 1885 was 128,967 miles; in
1893 it was 170,607 miles.

In the same years with the opening of these continental lines began the
consolidation of the older ones into great systems. The New York Central
had already been formed out of sixteen different fragments, but the
process of consolidation in a large way may be said to have been
instituted by Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1869, when he joined the Lake
Shore and Michigan Southern with the New York Central, thus placing
under a single administration the entire route from New York to Chicago.
The first train pierc