QUOTE : The first rail connection reached Titusville in 1862, eventually superseding the artificial-freshet mêlée. In its first fourteen months, the new Oil Creek Rail Road carried away more than 430,000 barrels of oil and delivered more than 459,000 empty barrels to the oil well sites; sixty thousand passengers traveled in and out of the region by rail during the same period.8 The ultimate improvement would be pipelines to move the oil from the wellhead to the railroad. Those came in various gauges from two to six inches, the oil flowing by gravity or pumped by steam, beginning in 1863.