Champlain, a line running across the northern part of New York
State, which had also come under Vanderbilt control.

When business revived in the closing years of the nineteenth
century, the history of American railroads began a new chapter.
Federal railroad regulation, which started in a moderate way with
the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887, had steadily
increased through the years; the Sherman Anti-trust Act, passed
in 1890, had been interpreted broadly as affecting the railroads
of the country as well as the industrial and other combinations.
These influences had thus greatly curtailed the consolidation of
competing lines which had gone on so rapidly during the decades
following the Civil War. Railroad managers and financiers
therefore began to face a very serious problem. Competition of a
more or less serious nature was still rampant, rates were cut,
and traffic was pretty freely diverted by dubious means.
Consequently many large railroad systems of heavy capitalization
bid fair to run into difficulties on the first serious falling
off in general business.

Great men are usually the products of their times and one of the
men developed by these times takes rank with the greatest
railroad leaders in history. Edward H. Harriman had risen in ten
years from comparative obscurity and was now the president of the
Union Pacific Railroad, which he had, in conjunction with the
banking house of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, reorganized and taken
out of bankruptcy. Harriman was one of the originators of the
"community of interest" idea, a device for the partial control of
one railroad system by another. For instance, although the law
forbade any railroad system from acquiring a complete control of