crude oil downstream at once. Most skiffs held between of oil, but one third of that leaked out of the skiffs before they were even launched and another third was lost by the time the skiffs reached Pittsburgh. Only three in five of the flimsy vessels survived the trip without being destroyed by collisions with rocks, fallen trees, or other skiffs. In 1862 the Oil Creek Railroad Company completed a line that connected Titusville to the Philadelphia and Erie Railroad and the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad in Corry, Pennsylvania. The new railroad brought more people into the Oil Creek Valley and provided a safer alternative to the freshets for transporting barrels of crude. The oil was carried from the wells to the railroad in horse-drawn wagons. In 1865 Laurence Myers of Philadelphia made an improvement on a patent from 1851 that was invented to transport coal at that time. The patent on July 18th, 1865 was an improvement made for a freight car that would transport petroleum and crude oil. He named it the Rotary Oil Car. It was the first appearance of an oil tank on wheels. Three books mention his invention Pipelines were laid from the oil fields directly to the rail line, ending horse-drawn transport. The following year, the Farmers Railroad extended the rail line 20 km south from Petroleum Center, Pennsylvania to Oil City. In February 1871, the Union City & Titusville Railroad (UC&T), which was built to compete with the Oil Creek Railroad, was completed. The UC&T became part of the larger Philadelphia and Erie Railroad in July 1871. Consolidation and end of the boom The rush to Pennsylvania created violent swings in the petroleum market for the first decade of the oil boom. In 1861, the proliferation of wells across the Oil Creek Valley pushed the price of oil down from $10 a barrel to 10 cents a barrel. In response, producers in the region formed the Oil Creek Association to restrict output and maintain a minimum price of $4 a barrel. Despite efforts such as this to control the petroleum market, the volatile boom-bust cycle continued into the early 1870s. By 1871, refining capacity had grown to over 12 million barrels per year, more than twice the amount of oil that was actually processed in that year. The first oil exchange in the US was established in Titusville in January 1872 in