By the 1850s North Carolina was committed to improving its transportation. Railroads — one of them the longest in the world when it was built — connected the state’s major towns and carried goods to market. With better transportation, wealthy people could even travel for pleasure. At the same time, other technologies, such as the telegraph, were making work and communication easier. In this chapter we’ll examine some of the ways that railroads and other new technologies affected the way people lived and worked.