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interests.^® Because of such conditions congestion resulted all 
along the lines. 
Even if prejudices and jealousies could have been con- 
quered there would still have remained serious obstacles to be 
overcome on account of the different gauges used by the vari- 
ous railroads. Within the last sixty years railroad equip- 
ment of all kinds has become largely standardized, but this 
was not the case in the sixties of the last century. Today a 
locomotive and cars can usually be transferred from one rail- 
way system to another without inconvenience, but this could 
be rarely done then because the distance between the irons of 
the track varied from four to six feet.^^ The European na- 
tions have deliberately built their tracks of different widths to 
prevent an enemy country from using them in time of war, 
but these differences in the United States were due to the 
whims of the builder or at least to the fancied belief that one 
gauge had advantages over another. Whatever may have 
been the motives back of this, it is plain that it was a serious 
handicap to both the North and the South at a time when 
there was the utmost need that every agency should work in 
harmony and with the least friction.’^ 
In spite of this tendency toward short lines of various 
gauges and equipment, the decade prior to 1860 showed a de- 
cided tendency toward consolidation of short lines into sys- 
tems.^® Necessity, together with a greater ease in securing 
capital, brought this about. The short lines with the vexa- 
tions and costly transfers they necessitated did not meet the 
needs of an expanding business, and so the process of weld- 
ing several short lines into one was carried out especially 
in the North. In 1850, seven companies owned the lines 
connecting Buffalo and Albany, but the next year these were 
brought into one system, and by 1858 the Hudson River and 
five other lines were added to this system, since then called 
the New York Central. The Pennsylvania, the Baltimore and 
Ohio, and the Erie roads went thru a similar reorganization, 
^0 General James Longstreet asserts in his From Manassas to Appomattox (Phila- 
delphia, 1896), 434-437, that such conditions were very common. 
Sidney L. Miller, Railway Transportation, Principles and Point of View (Chicago 
and New York, 1924), 74, 
When Hooker was sent from Culpepper Court House, Va., to the aid of Rosecrans 
at Chattanooga his troops and supplies had to be hauled from one railway station to 
another and even ferried across the Ohio River at Louisville. 
Johnson, American Raihvay Transportation, 25 ; R. S. Cotterill, “Southern Rail- 
roads, 1850-1860”, in the Mississippi Valley Historical Revieiv, X, 396 (March, 1924). 
