<P> First they provided a highly efficient network for shipping freight and passengers across a large national market . The result was a transforming impact on most sectors of the economy including manufacturing, retail and wholesale, agriculture and finance . Supplemented with the Telegraph that added rapid communications, the United States now had an integrated national market practically the size of Europe, with no internal barriers or tariffs, all supported by a common language, and financial system and a common legal system . The railroads at first supplemented, then largely replaced the previous transportation modes of turnpikes and canals, rivers and intracoastal ocean traffic . For highly efficient Northern railroads played a major role in winning the Civil War, while the overburdened Southern lines collapsed in the face of an insurmountable challenge . In the late 19th century pipelines were built for the oil trade, and in the 20th century trucking and aviation emerged . </P> <P> Railroads financing provided the basis of the private (non-governmental) financial system . Construction of railroads was far more expensive than factories or canals . The famous Erie canal, 300 miles long in upstate New York, cost $7 million of state money, which was about what private investors spent on one short railroad in Western Massachusetts . A new steamboat on the Hudson, Mississippi, Missouri, or Ohio rivers cost about the same as one mile of track . </P> <P> In 1860, the combined total of railroad stocks and bonds was $1.8 billion; 1897 it reached $10.6 billion (compared to a total national debt of $1.2 billion). Funding came from financiers throughout the Northeast, and from Europe, especially Britain . The federal government provided no cash to any other railroads . However it did provide unoccupied free land to some of the Western railroads, so they could sell it to farmers and have customers along the route . Some cash came from states, or from local governments that use money as a leverage to prevent being bypassed by the main line . The larger sound came from the southern states during the Reconstruction era, as they try to rebuild their destroyed rail system . Some states such as Maine and Texas also made land grants to local railroads; the state total was 49 million acres . The emerging American financial system was based on railroad bonds . Boston was the first center, but New York by 1860 was the dominant financial market . The British invested heavily in railroads around the world, but nowhere more so than the United States; The total came to about $3 billion by 1914 . In 1914--1917, they liquidated their American assets to pay for war supplies . </P> <P> The third dimension was in designing complex managerial systems that could handle far more complicated simultaneous relationships that could be dreamed of by the local factory owner who could patrol every part of his own factory in a matter of hours . Civil engineers became the senior management of railroads . The leading innovators were the Western Railroad of Massachusetts and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in the 1840s, the Erie in the 1850s and the Pennsylvania in the 1860s . </P>

How were most railroad companies able to finance the building of their rail lines
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