Yet, though this great change in traffic routes took place in the
course of the war, the actual consolidations of the various small
railroads into great trunk lines did not begin until after peace
had been assured. The establishment of five great railroads
extending continuously from the Atlantic seaboard to Chicago and
the West was perhaps the most remarkable economic development of
the ten or fifteen years succeeding the war. By 1875 these five
great trunk lines, the New York Central, the Pennsylvania, the
Erie, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the Grand Trunk, had connected
their scattered units and established complete through systems.

All the vexations that had necessarily accompanied railroad
traffic in the days when each one these systems had been a series
of disconnected 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