LAST EDITED ON 10-22-12 AT 06:55 PM (EST)I'm pretty sure guns had moved past muskets pre-electricity.
Guns moved past muskets during the 1850s, when you were able to build machines to bore rifling into gun barrels -- but you used boiler power to run those machines, and I'm not sure there are many steam boilers around any longer, because they were SO dangerous.
Bullets were a post-electricity invention, though. Early rifles, such as those that both the North and South developed around 1862, used Minie balls.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini%C3%A9_ball
Minie balls were unbelievably accurate compared to muskets. Muskets put no spin on the bullets, and so they could go anywhere, sort of like a Tim Wakefield knuckleball. By contrast, rifling put spin on Minie balls, and so they traveled true, more like a Roger Clemens fastball (post-steroids).
And the idea that it took 12 years after "the event" (whatever) to get a single steam train running is, I think, ridiculous.
Why do you think that was the first trip on the train? The tracks apparently extended, unbroken, between near-Chicago and Philadelphia. Since at least some bridges might have collapsed during 12 years, it seems very unlikely that this was the first trip.
The issue, though, would be to come up with a working steam engine that runs on a modern-gauge track. There can't be too many of those lying around.
To be honest, both of those things seem more or less plausible.
The idea of stopping power from chemical reactions in batteries, through whatever "the event" was? Preposterous.