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 Cornelius 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