Author Topic: My history lesson for today  (Read 1204 times)

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Offline oldcoastie6468

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My history lesson for today
« on: February 23, 2014, 10:39:49 PM »
Quote
A history of track gauge
How 4 feet, 8-1/2 inches became the standard
By George W. Hilton
Published: May 1, 2006

The gauge of a railroad is the distance between the inside vertical surfaces of the head of the rail. Standard gauge is 4 feet, 8-1/2 inches. This is the gauge with which steam railroading began, and it became the common gauge of Britain, North America, and Western Europe except for Spain, Portugal, and Ireland.

But how did this seemingly odd width become standard?

When George Stephenson designed the Stockton & Darlington Railway in the north of England in 1825, he used a gauge of 4 feet, 8 inches simply because he had been familiar with it on a mine tramway called the Willington Way on the Tyne River below Newcastle. In turn, the Willington Way had been built to this gauge because it was common on roads in the area. After the Stockton & Darlington, Stephenson used the same 4 feet, 8 inches for the Liverpool & Manchester, the world's first railway between major cities. There he widened the gauge by one-half inch, probably to give more lateral play to the flanges.

At the outset, the choice of 4 feet 8-1/2 appeared arbitrary. The tramways of the Newcastle area had a variety of other gauges, wider and narrower, any of which Stephenson might have chosen.

By the 1870's, archeological excavations at Pompeii and elsewhere were revealing that the gauge Stephenson chose may have been the approximate gauge of Roman road vehicles. In a famous episode, an American engineer, Walton W. Evans, sought to test this hypothesis by measuring with a metric rule - so as to avoid bias - the ruts made by carts and chariots at Pompeii. He converted his measurements to inches and found that the ruts, center to center, were about 4 feet, 9 inches, consistent with a gauge of slightly less than that. Later archeology confirmed that this was the Romans' common gauge.

The survival of this gauge for road vehicles in Western Europe, including Britain, resulted in its being carried over onto early railways. An oral tradition says it was established at two strides of a Roman soldier by Julius Caesar to standardize ruts for his war chariots, but this has no documentary evidence and is not generally accepted. As English railway historian Charles E. Lee wrote, it probably represents the optimal size of a road vehicle relative to the indivisible size of a horse. Anything less would have underutilized the horse, and anything greater would have put excessive strain on the animal. The gauge has been carried over into automotive transport, also.

In railroading, the optimal gauge with respect to a horse is irrelevant. Rather, the relevant indivisibility is that of a human being. Any technological process has to be adapted to the fact that human beings generally come only in one size, from 5 feet, 0 inches to 6 feet, 6 inches. Certainly, the gauge of 4 feet, 8-1/2, inches was not grossly inappropriate. It allowed passenger cars that seated two people in comfort on each side of an aisle wide enough for people to pass. Freight cars were large enough to accommodate the size of packages that people could carry in and stack. The equipment had a moderate degree of overhang.

Broader gauges tried, and rejected, in England

There has never been a lack of observers who thought 4 feet 8-1/2 was suboptimal - men as disparate as James J. Hill, David P. Morgan, and Adolf Hitler, to name three. Essentially, this interpretation is based on the fact that area-volume ratios of cylinders become more favorable as size increases. As a consequence, large boilers produce their output at a lower average cost than small ones. On a broad-gauge steam locomotive, the boiler could be larger and slung lower for greater stability.

The man who followed broad-gauge ideology most thoroughly was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, chief engineer of the Great Western Railway of England, who thought 4 feet 8-1/2, much too small for the operations at 50 to 60 mph that he envisioned. He adopted a huge gauge of seven feet - apparently exactly 7 feet, 0-1/4 inches - for the Great Western, and testified before Parliament enthusiastically of its superiority. Parliament was not convinced, and mandated 4 feet 8-1/2 for future building, but specified 5 feet 3 for Ireland. This could be interpreted as indicating Parliament really considered a broader gauge preferable, but required 4 feet 8-1/2 simply because it was nearly universal except in the west of England. The Great Western was converted to 4 feet 8-1/2, slowly, bringing broad-gauge operation to an end in 1892.

http://trn.trains.com/sitecore/content/Home/Railroad%20Reference/Railroad%20History/2006/05/A%20history%20of%20track%20gauge.aspx?sc_lang=en
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Offline fordguy_85

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Re: My history lesson for today
« Reply #1 on: February 24, 2014, 01:10:17 AM »
Interesting background info... Thanks for sharing
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Offline Libertas

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Re: My history lesson for today
« Reply #2 on: February 24, 2014, 06:40:16 AM »
I know I've read that before, possibly an old thread from one of our migratory sites, still dang interesting though, there are other examples like this how things from antiquity stuck with us and people long forgot why.

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