Afterwards the packet-boat men thought differently. Hardly had the Mohawk & Hudson been opened on August 9, 1831, by an excursion trip behind the American built locomotive _DeWitt Clinton_, when the railroad fever took hold of New York State as hard as the canal fever had taken hold of it but a few years before. Railroads were planned everywhere and some of them were built. Men began to dream of a link of railroads all the way through from Albany to Buffalo and even the troubles of a decade, marked with a monumental financial crash, could not entirely avail to stop railroad-building. The railroads came, step by step; one railroad from Schenectady to Utica, another from that pent-up city to Syracuse, still another from Syracuse to Rochester. From Rochester separate railroads led to Tonawanda and Niagara Falls; to Batavia, Attica, and Buffalo. But the panic of '37 was a hard blow to ambitious financial schemes, and it was six years thereafter before the all-rail route from Albany to Buffalo was a reality. Even after that it was a crude sort of affair. At several of the large towns across the State the continuity of the rails was broken. Utica was jealous of this privilege and defended it on one occasion through a committee of eminent draymen, 'bus-drivers, and inn-keepers, who went down to Albany to keep two of the early routes from making rail connections within her boundaries. At Rochester there was a similar break, wherein both passengers and freight had to be transported by horses across the city from the railroad that led from the east to the railroad that led towards the west. This matter of carrying passengers across a city has always stimulated local pride. Along in the fifties Erie, Pa., waged a bitter war to prevent the Lake Shore Railroad from making its gauge uniform through that city and abandoning a time-honored transfer of passengers and freight there. But there seems to be no stopping of the hand of ultimate destiny in railroading. The little weak roads across the Empire State were first gathered into the powerful New York Central, and after a time they were permitted to carry freight, the privilege denied them a long time because of the power of the Erie Canal. After a little longer time there was a great bridge built across the Hudson River at Albany, and soon after the close of the Civil War shrewd old Commodore Vanderbilt brought the railroad that had been built up the east shore of the Hudson, his pet New York & Harlem, and the merged chain of railroads across the State, into the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad, his great lifework. That system spread itself steadily. It built a new short line from Syracuse to Rochester, another from Batavia to Buffalo. It absorbed and it consolidated; gradually it sent its tentacles over the entire imperial strength of New York State. CHAPTER II THE GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE RAILROAD