You will now listen to part of a lecture. You will then be asked a question abou

Living in this, the late Automobile Age, it is difficult to neglect the impact that railroads had on American business and culture. In today’s lecture, I’d like to sketch out two broad effects railroads had on business.
First of all and most obviously, railroads made for the easy shipment of goods. A journey that took all day by horse cart, now took an hour and soon less. A week’s travel shrank to less than half a day. So, say you were a watchmaker. Before the railroad, you could only sell to customers in your city. With the coming of trains, you could sell anywhere. That’s not all. You could now sell everywhere in a global scale. That is, your potential market was now wherever the trains ran. So that’s right, the easy shipment of goods was an invitation for making shops and factories bigger and bigger.
Second, factories could now be located anywhere. In the early days of industry, factories were tied to coal-mining regions, because their machinery ran on steam power, and steam takes heat, and fires need coal. The early industrial regions, the north of England, Germany’s Ruhr, and the American Northeast were all coal-rich areas. They were also iron-producing regions as well. With trains, though, coal and ore could be transported to population centers. This not only made for widespread industry, but also drove down the price of labor. Factories could now be relocated to wherever workers were cheap.