It is not difficult to understand why the associates should have gradually shifted their main interest from the Central Pacific to the Southern Pacific if we remember that their interests were widely extended as the result of their building enterprises in Southern California, and that Central Pacific securities were the only parts of their holdings on which they could realize in cash. Southern Pacific stock and bonds had no market in New York; Central Pacific stock and bonds had such a market. Doubtless, the associates could not have afforded to dispose of their Central Pacific holdings if this would have imperiled their control of the Ogden route, but such a result did not necessarily follow, as we shall see. Having sold Central Pacific securities in large quantities, however, it was natural for the Stanford-Huntington group to wish to make the company in which their main interest now lay a dominant partner in the Central Pacific-Southern Pacific combination. And this is probably the explanation of the transaction which we are about to describe. New York Meetings Let us return to the meeting of Huntington and his associates at New York in the summer and fall of 1884, at which the details of the reorganization were worked out. The first business there considered was the purchase of the interest of one T. W. Pierce in the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway and the making of certain adjustments of interests of the associates in connection therewith. The next was the taking of an inventory of securities on hand in New York and those used as collateral for the payment of liabilities of Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins, and Crocker. On September 11 the question of the reorganization of the Southern Pacific system was taken up, and the following order of business was agreed upon: (1) consolidation of all the lines of the Southern Pacific system in one company; (2) separation of Central Pacific business from Southern Pacific business; (3) leasing of the Central Pacific system to the Southern Pacific system (new organization); (4) general consolidation of lines from San Francisco to Newport News. The fourth item referred to a proposal that Stanford, Crocker, and the Hopkins estate enter with Huntington into the ownership of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, opening the way for a transcontinental rail line from coast to coast. This offer was declined; no further reference need be made to it.[211]