An interesting feature of the operation of the eastern end of this route of communication across the Keystone State, which was afterwards to develop into the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad, was the communal nature of the enterprise. The railroad was regarded as a highway. Any person was supposedly free to use its rails for the hauling of his produce in his own cars. The theory of the Columbia & Philadelphia Railroad was simply that of an improved turnpike. For ten years after the opening of the line in 1834, the horse-teams of private freight haulers alternated upon the tracks between steam locomotives hauling trains. A team of worn-out horses hauling a four-wheeled car, loaded with farm produce could, and frequently did keep a passenger train hauled by a steam locomotive fretting along for hours behind it. In the end the use of horses was abolished on the Philadelphia & Columbia--the name of the road had been reversed--and in 1857 the road was sold by the State to the newly organized Pennsylvania Railroad Company. The Pennsylvania had already built a through rail route from Columbia over the Alleghanies, and, by the aid of the wonderful Horse Shoe Curve and the Gallitzin Tunnel, through to Pittsburgh; it had created its shop-town of Altoona and abandoned for all time the Alleghany Portage Railroad. But before the consolidation came to pass, two companies had been organized to control freight-carrying upon the tracks of the Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad. One of these was the People's line, the other the Union line; and in them was the germ of the private car lines, which in recent years have become so vexed a problem to the Interstate Commerce Commission. There were other short railroad lines in Pennsylvania, most of them built to bring the products of the rapidly developing anthracite district down to tidewater. Across New York State another chain of little railroads, which were in their turn to become the main stem of one of America's mightiest systems, was under construction. The first of this chain to be built was the Mohawk & Hudson, extending from the capital city of Albany, by means of a sharply graded plane, to a tableland which brought it in turn to a descending plane at Schenectady. At this last city it enjoyed a connection with the Erie Canal, and for a time the packet-boat men hailed the new railroad as a great help to their trade. It shortened a great time-taking bend in the canal, and helped to popularize that waterway just so much as a passenger carrier.