He came to New York City while a young man and engaged in business, becoming in time senior partner in the dry-goods commission and importing house of Moran & Iselin.

He became president of the company on the eve of the great financial upheaval of 1857, the disastrous effects of which harassed and hampered his earnest efforts in the herculean task he had undertaken, all through his two years' administration.

This was the situation that confronted the Erie when Charles Moran returned from Europe in July 1857, where he had gone the previous winter to raise loans.

[10] It was announced of Mr. Moran in the public prints, upon his election as President of the Erie, that he was a man of high character and integrity, of vigorous mind, and devoted to the study of political economy, which was at the foundation of the success of any work of this description; that he had superior administrative ability, and that his election would give great satisfaction to all true friends of the enterprise, both at home and abroad.

All this about Mr. Moran was undoubtedly true, but within the next two years he was to learn by bitter experience that it required something more than devotion to the study of political economy to be at the foundation of the success of such a work as the New York and Erie Railroad was.

It had been the custom, as a bid for new business and an inducement to retain old, to issue free passes to drovers who accompanied their cattle to market on the stock trains, and to "freighters."

There were about 160 persons receiving these free tickets, and the issuing of them had been regarded as good business policy by all managements up to the Moran control.

[11] Money was necessary to carry forward the improvements the company had then in hand, but which were being delayed by lack of funds, so a scheme for a fourth mortgage loan was announced early in August 1857.

The object of the loan was to fund the debt of the company, and to obtain means to continue the construction of the Bergen tunnel, the depots, wharves and other improvements of the Long Dock property.

[11] It was a discouraging time for negotiating loans, however, even on the most approved security, for it was at the height of the panic of 1857 when banks were failing by the score, and the oldest business houses were trembling on the verge of bankruptcy; but President Moran and his associates went to work- in earnest to place the new bonds.

President Moran made an address which is to-day a graphic and in some respects an amusing – exhibit of the company's situation and tribulations in that critical year.

[11] The most important difficulty the road had to contend with, Moran explained in 1857, was the engineers' strike of the fall of 1856: By the end of the year on Tuesday, December 1, 1887, by order of President Charles Moran, a reduction of wages and salaries of employees went into effect, owing to the hard times and the critical condition There were 250 laborers at the pier at Piermont, handling freight.

When his order to reduce wages and salaries was issued, inquiry was made by the men as to whether the president hid submitted to a reduction in his own great stipend.

The hopeless state of entanglement in the affairs of the Company culminated on the 4th of that month in the recovery of a judgment against it for $35,000 default in sinking fund bonds, and an execution was issued the same day.

Other suits were pending in which the same questions were involved, and it became plain that if the bondholders wished to protect the property of the corporation, and hold it together against a reorganization, some steps must be taken at once.

That Charles Moran made earnest and conscientious endeavor to extricate the company from its troubles and start it forward on a successful career it would be unjust to doubt.

The conclusions in regard to the effect on prices, of bank-note issues, were arrived at and communicated to friends long before reading trie able works of Fullarton and Tooke, in which similar views are maintained.

Their theory is, that because credit is the basis of all extended commerce, the banking system of a country should be so constituted as to come to the rescue of a credit destroyed by injudicious investments in times of overtrading and speculation..."[17] The Nevada and Oregon Railroad, a narrow-gauge line found in 1882 building from north from Reno was sold to their largest investor, the Moran Brothers, a group of New York investors, at foreclosure in 1884 and operated unofficially as the Nevada and California Railroad.