Railroads:....ummmm....the first steam powered railroad in the US was in South Carolina. Charleston SC was one of the major seaports on the east coast. Construction of a railroad from Charleston SC to Cincinatti Ohio had started and that would have made it quicker and cheaper to ship midwest products thru the port of Charleston than thru the ports of the North.
While it's not in any histroy books, this story is past around by some southerners as being the major cause of the war. Remember, taxes at that time were placed on exports and imports with the south paying the major portion of all federal taxes....70 to 80%.
It's an interesting idea, I guess I'd want to see some real data on cargo analysis before buying too large a piece of it though. I'm not sure how important Midwestern cargo was to the MidAtlantic ports prior to 1860 though, which would be my major reservation about it.
I've always been kind of a railroad buff, and the war itself had a truly huge technological impact on it. There was the unifying work of the whole USMRR under General Haupt on organization, rolling stock rationalization, and supporting civil engineering; also shortly afterward and based on a lot of wartime issues the adoption of a single Standard Gauge (1869 I believe). Also the completion of the first of the four major transcontinental routes shortly after the war. Together these created an explosion of rail capacity, traffic and commerce in rail-transported goods and commodities, with more developments like Bessemer steel rail slightly later. 1860-era rolling stock was not up to the kind of traffic that 1875-1980 and later era cars were by any means, I'm not sure that except for a handful of visionaries the impact of such a route would have been really foreseeable as a vital goods route (As opposed to its value for passengers, which would have been clear) in 1860. The whole railway picture changed as drastically between 1860 and 1875 and air transport did between 1940 and 1960.
