When business revived in the closing years of the nineteenth century, the history of American railroads began a new chapter. Federal railroad regulation, which started in a moderate way with the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887, had steadily increased through the years; the Sherman Anti-trust Act, passed in 1890, had been interpreted broadly as affecting the railroads of the country as well as the industrial and other combinations. These influences had thus greatly curtailed the consolidation of competing lines which had gone on so rapidly during the decades following the Civil War. Railroad managers and financiers therefore began to face a very serious problem. Competition of a more or less serious nature was still rampant, rates were cut, and traffic was pretty freely diverted by dubious means. Consequently many large railroad systems of heavy capitalization bid fair to run into difficulties on the first serious falling off in general business. Great men are usually the products of their times and one of the men developed by these times takes rank with the greatest railroad leaders in history. Edward H. Harriman had risen in ten years from comparative obscurity and was now the president of the Union Pacific Railroad, which he had, in conjunction with the banking house of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, reorganized and taken out of bankruptcy. Harriman was one of the originators of the "community of interest" idea, a device for the partial control of one railroad system by another. For instance, although the law forbade any railroad system from acquiring a complete control of a competing line by purchasing a majority of its capital stock or by leasing it, nothing was said about one railroad having a minority investment interest in another. A minority investment, even though it be as low as ten or twenty per cent, usually constitutes a dominating influence if held by a single interest, for in most cases the majority of the shares will be owned in small blocks by thousands of investors who never combine for a definite, practical purpose. Thus the interest which has the one large block of stock usually controls the voting power, and runs little risk of losing it unless a contest develops with other powerful interests--and this is a contingency which it almost never has to meet. Carrying out this policy of promoting harmony among competing lines, the New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroad early in 1900 acquired a working control of the Reading Company, which in turn controlled the New Jersey Central and dominated the anthracite coal traffic. Later the Baltimore and Ohio shared this Reading interest with the Lake Shore of the New York Central system. The New York Central and the Pennsylvania acquired a working control of the same kind in the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, which was an important element in the soft coal fields and was reaching out to grasp soft coal properties in Ohio and Indiana.