The immediate success of this road was a signal for the beginning of more extensive railway construction, and the decade from 1850 to 1860 witnessed the entrance of the trunk line roads as competitors with the canals for traffic between the East and the West. The failure of the Pennsylvania Canal and the growing prosperity of Boston incited the people of Pennsylvania to take decisive steps to win back some of the trade lost by Philadelphia and in 1846 the Pennsylvania Railroad Company was chartered for the purpose of completing steam railway connection between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. By 1854, this line, the Erie, the New York Central and the Baltimore and Ohio all reached the Ohio River or Lake Erie. During the next six years these four lines took over two-thirds of the flour traffic and practically all the merchandise and live-stock traffic between the eastern cities and the trans-Alleghany region, leaving to the Erie Canal the forest products and grain. In addition to capturing a large share of the canal freight the railroads easily secured most of the traffic that was accustomed to go from the cities along the Ohio River to the eastern coast and to Europe by way of New Orleans. The lakes and canals had previously made some inroad on the commerce down the Mississippi, but notwithstanding their influence the river cities of Ohio and Kentucky continued to send the largest part of their exports southward until the railroads gave them a through route to the East. After 1855 the shipments down the river from Cincinnati and other important ports on the Ohio shrunk rapidly in volume and even before the war broke out their commerce with the East was much larger than their river trade to the South. While the railroads in the North were making such marked changes in the course of internal trade, a similar transformation was occurring in the South. Trade between the eastern and western sections of the cotton states before 1849, aside from some traffic in slaves, was almost negligible. In 1849 when the Western Atlantic Railroad began to run trains from Chattanooga to the Atlantic coast, the planters of Northern Alabama and Tennessee, who had always sent their cotton to New Orleans and Mobile, turned to the markets at Charleston and Savannah. The cotton receipts at those two ports doubled in a single year, while the receipts at New Orleans fell off nearly 100,000 bales. The shifting of the center of cotton production farther westward enabled New Orleans to make up for its losses, but the South Atlantic ports easily maintained and increased their trade. They also competed with New Orleans and the cities on the Ohio River for the merchandise trade of Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee, and the provisions for Georgia and South Carolina began to enter the states overland from the West, the coasting trade on the Atlantic seaboard both gaining and losing by the changes. 2. TRADE BETWEEN THE NORTH AND SOUTH