Probably the country received its most striking illustration of this when the West Shore Railroad in New York State was built almost completely duplicating the New York Central, with the result that both roads were nearly bankrupted. While no one railroad can completely duplicate another line, two or more may compete at particular points. By 1870 this contingency had produced what was regarded as the greatest abuse of the time--the familiar problem of "long and short haul." Two or more railroads, starting at an identical point, would each pursue a separate course for several hundred miles and then suddenly come together again at another large city. The result was that they competed at terminals, but that each existed as an independent monopoly at intermediate points. The scramble for business would thus cause the roads to cut rates furiously at terminals; but since there was no competition at the intervening places the rates at these points were kept up, and sometimes, it was charged, were raised in order to compensate for losses at the terminals. Thus resulted that anomaly which strikes so strangely the investigator of the railroad problem--that rates apparently have no relation to the distance covered, and that the charge for hauling a load for seventy-five miles may be actually higher than that for hauling the same load one hundred or one hundred and fifty miles. The expert, looking back upon nearly a hundred years of railroad history, may now satisfactorily explain this curious circumstance; but it is not surprising that the farmer of the early seventies, overburdened with debt and burning his own corn for fuel because he could not pay the freight exacted for hauling it to market, saw in the system only an attempt to plunder. Yet even the shippers at terminal points had their grievances, for the competition at these points became so savage and so ruinous that the roads soon entered into agreements fixing rates or formed "pools." In accordance with this latter arrangement, all business was put into a common pot, as the natural property of the roads constituting the pool; it was then allotted to different lines according to a percentage agreement, and the profits were divided accordingly. As the purpose of rate agreements and pools was to stop competition and to keep up prices, it is hardly surprising that they were not popular in the communities which they affected. The circumstance that, after solemnly entering into pools, the allied roads would frequently violate their agreements and cut rates surreptitiously merely added to the general confusion.