In short, speculation in every conceivable form ran riot in a way not repeated thereafter for nearly twenty years.
Aside from rampant speculation, American railroad history during the eighties must record various other economic events of importance. The city of New York and the New York Central Railroad were at the culmination of their relative importance in the export trade of the country. The volume of eastbound tonnage was enormous in the early eighties. In 1881, 2,500,000 tons of freight east bound were carried by the New York Central alone, a figure surpassed in only two years until 1896. Another event of importance was the general westward drift of population and agriculture. This was accompanied by a corresponding migration of manufactures inland from the Atlantic seaboard. The lines from the Central West to the South, such as the Illinois Central and the Cincinnati, New Orleans & Texas Pacific road, had formerly relied almost entirely upon the carriage of grain or flour and packing-house products from the farms of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to the cotton-raising South. During the latter half of the eighties they carried an ever increasing proportion of manufactured goods, such as boots and shoes, clothing, wooden ware, harnesses and groceries,--in fact everything denoted by the words general merchandise. More and more the supplies of grain, flour and packing-house products were being produced in Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas, while larger quantities of general merchandise originated in the Middle West. The result was a need for new diagonal trunk lines from such points as Kansas City and Omaha into the lower Mississippi valley. The decline of Cincinnati as a great pork-packing centre dates from this time. Memphis and Vicksburg derived a new importance at the junction of such lines as the Kansas City, Memphis & Birmingham with the older Mississippi river roads. At about this time, in 1889, also, occurred the opening of the Gulf ports for the export of the surplus grain products of the territory west of the Mississippi. The significance of this for the eastern trunk lines did not appear until later; but the occurrence forms a part of that westward trend of population above mentioned. These years were all characterized by the increasing importance of long-distance through business, as distinguished from mere local trade. The markets of the country as a whole, the areas of commercial competition, were steadily expanding. Viewed in a large way, it was doubtless this economic phenomenon which at this time emphasized the need of centralized Federal control, instead of state regulation, if control there were to be. This found its expression in the passage by Congress of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887.