Get me on track in/re trains 2

[ivymike]

I've just received (again) an email relating the standard rail gage to the size of Roman chariots...

Anyone have the "real" story on how the gage for train tracks in the US was chosen? Or was it really 2 * (war horse's butt) + (horse to horse clearance)?

Was there a time when more than one gage of rails was in use in the US?

 

[dougantholz]

Pick up the book "To engineer is Human" by Petroski. He explains this as a coincidentally close measurement.

 

[ivymike]

okay, I've ordered the book, but it'll be a week before I get it. Anyone else want to take a stab at my questions, though? I'd like to get more than two viewpoints (the first via highly suspect email), if possible.

 

[JAE]

Found the following at the Black Mask site:

http://www.blackmask.com/books14c/rroaddex.htm

All the vexations that had necessarily accompanied railroad traffic in the days when each one these systems had been a series of disconnected roads had disappeared. The grain and meat products of the West, accumulating for the most part at Chicago and St. Louis, now came rapidly and uninterruptedly to the Atlantic seaboard, and railroad passengers, no longer submitted to the inconveniences of the Civil War period, now began to experience for the first time the pleasures of railroad travel. Together with the articulation of the routes, important mechanical changes and reconstruction programmes completely transformed the American railroad system. The former haphazard character of each road is evidenced by the fact that in Civil War days there were eight different gages, with the result that it was almost impossible for the rolling stock of one line to use another. A few years after the Civil War, however, the present standard gage of four feet eight and one-half inches had become uniform all over the United States. The malodorous "eating cribs" of the fifties and the sixties--little station restaurants located at selected spots along the line--now began to disappear, and the modern dining car made its appearance. The old rough and ready sleeping cars began to give place to the modern Pullman. One of the greatest drawbacks to ante-bellum travel had been the absence of bridges across great rivers, such as the Hudson and the Susquehanna. At Albany, for example, the passengers in the summer time were ferried across, and in winter they were driven in sleighs or were sometimes obliged to walk across the ice. It was not until after the Civil War that a great iron bridge, two thousand feet long, was constructed across the Hudson at this point. On the trains the little flickering oil lamps now gave place to gas, and the wood burning stoves--frequently in those primitive days smeared with tobacco juice--in a few years were displaced by the new method of heating by steam.

 

[PBroad]

Don't blame the Romans for everything. I'm not sure of the precise reference but if you get out your handi-unit conversion chart you will find that 4ft 8 and 5/8" is exactly 3 cubits! Thus lame the ancient Egyptian Charriot Builders not the Romans.

 

[ivymike]

dougantholz, I read that book cover-to-cover this weekend ("to engineer is human&quot, and didn't find the explanation that you said I'd find. The author seems to mention railroads only to make the point that railroad bridge failures were at least partially responsible for research into metal fatigue. I didn't find any mention of railroad gages or the like.

 

[etch]

Ah but what have the romans ever done for us?


Okay here is my thoguht on it, i think that usa and uk have different guage lengths for trains, so as i have also recieved this email about how guage length can be directly compared to roman chariots, i guess its just a good approximation, but it does make a good read.

 

[Escher]

It is interesting that you had many gauges in the USA as we had the same problem in Australia...but Mark Twain was not amused.

The following is an extract from the Victorian Railways Web site. It seems not dissimilar to the US experience

Early history
Australia's railways were developed in an ad-hoc manner, so that there were many different rail gauges across the continent. Victoria was the only state that had a coordinated plan.

As a result, the United Kingdom in 1846 passed the Gauge Act and called on the Australian states to adopt a uniform gauge of 4 foot, 8.5 inches. However, the New South Wales chief engineer at the time – an Irishman – claimed the Irish gauge of 5 foot, 3 inches was superior and in 1852 an Act was passed stating that the gauge of New South Wales railways would be 5 foot, 3 inches. Victoria and South Australia followed suit.

The chief engineer was replaced by a Scotsman who in 1854 decided to adopt the United Kingdom's 4 foot, 8.5 inch gauge but failed to tell the other states. Victoria and South Australia had already committed to rolling stock and their railways both went into service on 5 foot, 3 inch gauge. Queensland, which separated from New South Wales in 1859, highlighted its independence by opening its first railway in 1865 with a narrow 3 foot, 6 inch gauge. In Western Australia, the first Government-sponsored railway was built using 3 foot gauge that was soon altered to 3 foot, 3 inches.

The diversity of rail gauges in Australia led American author Mark Twain to proclaim in 1897:



Now comes a singular thing: the oddest thing, the strangest thing, the most baffling and unaccountable marvel that Australia can show…. All passengers fret at the double gauge; all shippers of freight must of course fret at it; unnecessary expense, delay, and annoyance are imposed upon everybody concerned, and no-one is benefited.

My Note.
The argument for the narrow gauge for the largest (and least populated) states in Australia was a saving on timber sleepers (railroad ties) in a narrow track.

 

[rhodie]

The only interesting input I have for this thread involves a speech I heard given by a retired US Force General. Yes, this is a true story. His topic was the commercialization of space travel, and his illustration involved this very topic. His point was that the business of space is not so far removed from other (normal) engineering projects.

He went into detail about the design constraints for the shuttle, explaining that load capacity was limited by available thrust, which was limited by rocket booster diameter, which was limited by how the engineers could transport the pre-assembled parts across the country, which was limited by the size of a railroad flatcar, which was limited by the radius of a slow-speed curve, which was determined by the width of the tracks, which was determined by the standard width of wagor ruts, which was determined by the outside width of two horses' backsides.

The punchline to his story is that two horses' asses defined the operational capacity of the space shuttle.

ha ha

(apologies in advance)

 

[steamboat444]

Not for nothing.....and apropo(sp?) of nothing....another railroad oddity that may be of interest is joint spacing.

Most countries stagger rail joints from one side to the other. This results in the hypnotic "clickety clack" that we are all familiar with.

In Russia or the Soviet Union, for some period at least, the joints were at the same point on both sides. This caused a very jarring "clunk" every time the wheels on both sides went over the joints. I wish I could remember whose narrative of the train ride to the Gulag I read this in.

 

[ietech]

Try the Railroad Engineering thread you might get some interesting input from those folks.

forum671

 

[steamboat444]

https://hosta.atsc.eustis.army.mil/cgi-bin/atdl.dll/accp/tr0670/text.htm

This is probably more than you want to know but there is a section on rail gage that says it might come from Roman chariot ruts, but that no one is sure.

 

[DwattedWabbit]

In the coal-mining districts in the UK, a lot of narrow-gauge railroads (2-foot) were developed in the early 19th Century. That gauge may have been dictated by the tight spaces inside the mine shafts where the rails were laid. This reason for narrow-gauge is my thinking, but I don't know much about it, and others out there undoubtedly have more definitive comments.

Narrow-gauge was also used in this country (USA) in some places - New England is one area where they still can be found, primarily in transportation museums. One used to be active at Edaville Railroad in southeastern Massachusetts, an amusement park kind of place with train rides. The narrow-gauge trains there were used industrially on that site to haul cranberries from the cultivated bogs there. (Edaville Railroad as an amusement park is now closed, but the trains may still run, since I think the cranberry bogs are still being actively cultivated.)

 

[btrueblood]

Another reason for narrow gauge rails is to allow tighter turns, as in mountainous regions.

 

[gearguru]

steamboat444,
you probably read a book by Solzhenitzyn - and I'd guess that it was "One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich" or whatever the English translation of the title is. Sad story, by the way...