Standardization of qauges

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Could you please point me to a web site or give me information on how the multitude of railroad gauges in the USA became standardized to the extent it is today? Did the government intervene or did the companies come to some mutually beneficial compromise?

Thanks in advance.

-- Paul Hibbert (phibbert@cybermesa.com), February 06, 2001

Answers

Greg Perrine 04/25/01 08:06 AM To: Gail Perrine/OIT/BPD@BPD, Jim Eddy/OIT/BPD@BPD, Skip Holstein/OIT/BPD@BPD cc: Subject: why are rr tracks 4'8.5" wide?

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US railroads.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe (and England) were built by Imperial Rome for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? Roman war chariots first made the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels and wagons. Since the chariots were made for, or by Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

Thus, we have the answer to the original question. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Specifications and bureaucracies live forever. So, the next time you are handed a specification and wonder which horse's rear came up with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war-horses.

There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges and horses' behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. Thiokol makes the SRBs at their factory at Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory had to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses behinds.

So, the major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a Horse's ass!

-- Skip H (parmetta@yahoo.com), April 25, 2001.


There is a lot of folklore about the origin of standard gauge. The best discussion I've seen is in George Hilton's "American Narrow Gauge Railroads". Essentially, the Brits came up with 4'81/2". In 19th century America gauges ran from 3'6" to 6 feet! For example, an act of Congress overrode Lincoln's decision on the gauge for the transcontinental railroad. Congress said 4'81/2". Lincoln apparently preferred the broader 5' gauge of the Illinois Central, his old law client. The North led the conversion to standard gauge. Ultimately, the South, which did not follow standard gauge, found itself increasingly at an economic disadvantage. On Feb. 2, 1886, representatives of the L&N, Cincinnati Southern and other Dixie roads met and agreed to convert to standard gauge. Between May 31 and June 1 of 1886, 13,000 miles of railroad was converted! This left primarily the Pennsylvania with 4'9" gauge, which was converted a short time later.

-- Jerry Dowling (jdowling@lcc.net), February 12, 2001.

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