Another serious effect was that areas that could not be reached by railroad had to deal with a major decline in population. The costs of supplying plains and desert communities continued to rise, and so many families moved to less arid states located in the center of America. The resulting abandoned communities created ghost towns across the West. Although the Transcontinental Railroad provided an opportunity for towns to flourish that had access, a vast majority of settlements that still relied on wagons to transport goods from place to place didn't have the means to pay the cost needed to survive.
