<Dd> the energies of a generation, for it required all the new machinery to be created--capital, banks, mines, furnaces, shops, power - houses, technical knowledge, mechanical population, together with a steady remodelling of social and political habits, ideas, and institutions to fit the new scale and suit the new conditions . The generation between 1865 and 1895 was already mortgaged to the railways, and no one knew it better than the generation itself . </Dd> <P> The impact can be examined through five aspects: shipping, finance, management, careers, and popular reaction . </P> <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>

What was the main form of mass transit in the west before the civil war