The original lines of this road were laid out in the form of a large Y, one leg of which ran from Dubuque, Iowa, southward, meeting the other leg, which extended south from Chicago. The two legs of the Y met at what is now Central City, and thence the line ran south to Cairo. This road was one of the earliest attempts to parallel the old water-highways that had once carried the freight of a riparian population. Its first grant was made in 1850, and its first train was run in 1855. During the war this line was of much service in transporting troops and material to the southward. Yet, in spite of its well-conceived plan, and in spite of the natural wealth of the country it traversed, the road as a property was a source of perpetual anxiety to its shareholders. It needed a great mind to straighten out its problems, and Mr. Sturges thought that his son-in-law had that mind. He therefore despatched Mr. Osborn to Chicago, and gave him full charge of the system. The choice was a wise one. Mr. Osborn brought the property through the panic of 1857, when all securities were falling in ruins, and weathered even an assignment, which was made by the company during his absence in England. He backed his faith in his judgment by negotiating a personal loan of three million dollars, out of which he paid the matured coupons that were pressing for payment. He secured a new loan of five million dollars, paid off all the smaller debts, established the credit of the company, and set its affairs thenceforth upon a secure footing. All these details were such as might perhaps have been accomplished by another. It was not only in these executive matters that the genius of this captain evinced itself. He saw at once to the marrow of the difficulties that had caused this embarrassment. There had now been built around the foot of Lake Michigan those east-and-west through lines that killed the lake carriage just as his own road had killed the river carriage on the Mississippi trail. These roads reached out after their own business, and did not depend upon the traffic the north-and-south line carried. It was easy to foresee a failing business, but not so easy to name a remedy for it. Mr. Osborn found his remedy in the idea of a north-and-south transcontinental line. Between Cairo and the town of Jackson, Tennessee, there was a gap over which no railroad passed, though from Jackson as far south as New Orleans there ran the rambling lines of a system controlled by H. S. McComb, of Crédit Mobilier fame. Mr. Osborn secured the immature Southern roads, built the connection from Cairo to Jackson, and in 1873 had a completed line from the Lakes to the Gulf.