Standardization of American Rail Gauge

George Stephenson, who built the first practical steam locomotive in England, laid his rails based on the width of coal wagons. Laying the rails five feet apart and accounting for two inch wheels and a bit of leeway, the resulting space between the rails, or the rail gauge, was four feet eight and a half inches.  Stephenson used that gauge in when designing the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first rail line in England. The width came to be called the "Stephenson gauge." Opinions varied on the best rail gauge and a few British railroads chose different, wider gauges. However, they soon realized their tracks would ultimately have to become compatible with the Stephenson gauge or offload the passengers and freight to a new train when incompatible rails met. By the mid-s, by act of Parliament the Stephenson gauge became the designated standard gauge for England.

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American railroads would also eventually adopt the Stephenson, or standard, gauge. Both the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads laid rails with the four-foot-eight-and-a-half-inch gauge while building the transcontinental railroad, but the American path toward standardization was not nearly as straightforward as England's.

Because the British were the first to build railroads, some American engineers went to England to study railroad construction, and tended to use the Stephenson gauge. The first railroad in the state of New York, the Mohawk & Hudson, opened in using the Stephenson gauge, and a few others followed suit, but rail gauge was often chosen according to the inclination of the engineer in charge and some believed that a wider gauge would give a locomotive more stability.

Comparison of some railroad gauges. 

Scotch, narrow- 4 ft. 6 in.
Common English & American- 4 ft. 8 in.
Eastern counties & Blackwall, England- 5 ft.
Scotch, broad, Canadian Grand Trunk, East Indian- 5 ft. 6 in.
Irish- 6 ft. 2 in.
Great Western (English broad) - 7 ft.

Image source: Knight, Edward H. Knight&#;s American Mechanical Dictionary. Vol. 3, New York: J.B. Ford and Company, , p. , fig. .

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American railroads were planned to serve cities and their surrounding areas with little thought that these networks would eventually meet. From the s through the s, the number of gauges proliferated.  For example, the Camden & Amboy railroad, though in the vicinity of the Mohawk & Hudson, chose a four-foot-nine-and-three-quarter-inch gauge. In the South, the Charleston & Hamburg railway was built with a five-foot gauge. Nearby states that wanted to interact with the line, copied the gauge, so by , over 7,000 miles of track with this wider gauge had been laid throughout the South. The Ohio legislature established a four-foot-ten-inch gauge of for the state. The state of California chose a gauge of five feet, and some railroads in Missouri and Texas chose six feet. By the s, there were over twenty different gauges in use in America.

Gauge choice was not always an engineering decision. In some cases rails already existed that had moved coal using horses or mules to pull the cars, so the decision was made to continue that gauge.  Some railroads thought it was a good market strategy to use an odd gauge to fend off competitors. The New York & Erie Railroad not only believed a broader gauge was more stable but also that a six-foot gauge would prohibit rivals from connecting to their rails. Canada chose a five-foot-six-inch gauge as a military strategy: American trains could not operate on Canadian rails. As railways proliferated and travel expanded in the s and s, the breaks in gauge presented continual problems. 

A number of remedies were attempted. "Compromise cars" were built with 5-inch-wide wheels, an inch wider than normal, to allow them to travel on standard tracks and on four-foot-ten-inch-wide tracks.  Eventually thousands of compromise cars were built but they only worked on some of the railways and could not bridge the gap to run on the South's five-foot rails. Rail officials were opposed to the cars because the wide wheels sometimes slipped off the rails, resulting in accidents such as the Angola, New York, disaster caused when two compromise cars derailed and the coal stoves in the cars set everything ablaze, killing forty-nine people.

Charles Tisdale tried a different approach. His invention allowed car wheels to slide along a bar so they could be manually widened or narrowed to travel on tracks of various gauges. Though it looked like a good solution, this design, too, was prone to careless handling and wear, and caused many accidents.

Another solution was intended to carry narrower gauge cars over broad gauge roads and involved hoisting the narrower gauge cars onto rails placed atop broad gauge trucks. However, this made the car top-heavy and unstable and it only worked one way; the broader gauge cars could not sit atop trucks on the narrower rails.

One remedy for switching gauges was the Ramsey Car Transfer Apparatus. Instead of hoisting the cars off the trucks, the tracks were lowered and trucks with wheels of a different gauge were attached. Image source: Railroad Gazette. Vol. 12, no. 20, New York: Railroad gazette., , p. 257.

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Some railroads used steam-powered cranes or hoists to lift cars off one set of trucks and onto another. John Imboden patented a steam powered lifter manufactured by the Richmond Car-Lifter Company that raised a car off its current truck then lowered it onto a truck with wheels of the appropriate gauge. Though such systems could refit eight to ten cars per hour, it was still a rather slow and expensive process.

Sometimes the problem was attacked at the track level. Some companies laid a third rail inside or outside existing rails to accommodate trains of two different gauges. 

As markets widened and railroads began to move products outside local networks, it became evident that the only reasonable solution was to standardize rail gauges. One by one, railroad companies moved toward the Stephenson, or standard, gauge.

Changing the rails was an expensive process, both in actual labor costs, with some companies hiring thousands of workers to change all their rail lines all at once, and in loss of revenue due to railroad down time. But once the decision was made change came quickly.  For example, the Illinois Central hired 3,000 men to change their Southern line to the standard gauge, changing all 547 miles of track in one day.  The Louisville & Nashville hired 8,000 men to change their 2,000 miles of track to the standard gauge, also in one day.

The South, which had been isolated by the Civil War and Reconstruction, was the slowest to change, but by the end of the 19th century most railroad tracks in the U.S. had changed to the standard gauge. Even Canada, no longer concerned about an American invasion, had changed to the standard gauge.

Railway track gauge ( mm)

A standard-gauge railway is a railway with a track gauge of 1,435 mm (4 ft 8+1&#;2 in). The standard gauge is also called Stephenson gauge (after George Stephenson), international gauge, UIC gauge, uniform gauge, normal gauge in Europe,[1][2][3][4][5] and SGR in East Africa. It is the most widely used track gauge around the world, with about 55% of the lines in the world using it.

All high-speed rail lines use standard gauge except those in Russia, Finland, and Uzbekistan. The distance between the inside edges of the rails is defined to be 1,435 mm except in the United States, Canada, and on some heritage British lines, where it is defined in U.S. customary/Imperial units as exactly "four feet eight and one half inches",[6] which is equivalent to 1,435.1 mm.

History

As railways developed and expanded, one of the key issues was the track gauge (the distance, or width, between the inner sides of the rails) to be used. Different railways used different gauges, and where rails of different gauge met &#; a "gauge break" &#; loads had to be unloaded from one set of rail cars and reloaded onto another, a time-consuming and expensive process. The result was the adoption throughout a large part of the world of a "standard gauge" of 1,435 mm (4 ft 8+1&#;2 in), allowing interconnectivity and interoperability.

Origins

A popular legend that has circulated since at least [7] traces the origin of the 1,435 mm (4 ft 8+1&#;2 in) gauge even further back than the coalfields of northern England, pointing to the evidence of rutted roads marked by chariot wheels dating from the Roman Empire.[a][8] Snopes categorised this legend as "false", but commented that it "is perhaps more fairly labeled as 'Partly true, but for trivial and unremarkable reasons.'"[9] The historical tendency to place the wheels of horse-drawn vehicles around 5 ft (1,524 mm) apart probably derives from the width needed to fit a carthorse in between the shafts.[9] Research, however, has been undertaken to support the hypothesis that "the origin of the standard gauge of the railway might result from an interval of wheel ruts of prehistoric ancient carriages".[10][better source needed]

In addition, while road-travelling vehicles are typically measured from the outermost portions of the wheel rims, it became apparent that for vehicles travelling on rails, having main wheel flanges that fit inside the rails is better, thus the minimum distance between the wheels (and, by extension, the inside faces of the rail heads) was the important one.

A standard gauge for horse railways never existed, but rough groupings were used; in the north of England none was less than 4 ft (1,219 mm). Wylam colliery's system, built before , was 5 ft (1,524 mm), as was John Blenkinsop's Middleton Railway; the old 4 ft (1,219 mm) plateway was relaid to 5 ft (1,524 mm) so that Blenkinsop's engine could be used. Others were 4 ft 4 in (1,321 mm) (in Beamish) or 4 ft 7+1&#;2 in (1,410 mm) (in Bigges Main (in Wallsend), Kenton, and Coxlodge).[12]

English railway pioneer George Stephenson spent much of his early engineering career working for the coal mines of County Durham. He favoured 4 ft 8 in (1,422 mm) for wagonways in Northumberland and Durham, and used it on his Killingworth line. The Hetton and Springwell wagonways also used this gauge.

Stephenson's Stockton and Darlington railway (S&DR) was built primarily to transport coal from mines near Shildon to the port at Stockton-on-Tees. Opening in , the initial gauge of 4 ft 8 in (1,422 mm) was set to accommodate the existing gauge of hundreds of horse-drawn chaldron wagons[13] that were already in use on the wagonways in the mines. The railway used this gauge for 15 years before a change was made, debuting around , to the 1,435 mm (4 ft 8+1&#;2 in) gauge.[page needed] The historic Mount Washington Cog Railway, the world's first mountain-climbing rack railway, is still in operation in the 21st century, and has used the earlier 4 ft 8 in (1,422 mm) gauge since its inauguration in .

George Stephenson introduced the 1,435 mm (4 ft 8+1&#;2 in) gauge (including a belated extra 1&#;2 in (13 mm) of free movement to reduce binding on curves ) for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, authorised in and opened 30 September . The extra half inch was not regarded at first as very significant, and some early trains ran on both gauges daily without compromising safety.[16]

The success of this project led to Stephenson and his son Robert being employed to engineer several other larger railway projects. Thus the 4 ft 8+1&#;2 in (1,435 mm) gauge became widespread and dominant in Britain. Robert was reported to have said that if he had had a second chance to choose a gauge, he would have chosen one wider than 4 ft 8+1&#;2 in (1,435 mm).[17][18] "I would take a few inches more, but a very few".[19]

During the "gauge war" with the Great Western Railway, standard gauge was called "narrow gauge", in contrast to the Great Western's 7 ft 1&#;4 in (2,140 mm) broad gauge. The modern use of the term "narrow gauge" for gauges less than standard did not arise for many years, until the first such locomotive-hauled passenger railway, the Ffestiniog Railway, was built.[citation needed]

Adoption

In , in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, a Royal Commission on Railway Gauges reported in favour of a standard gauge. The subsequent Gauge Act ruled that new passenger-carrying railways in Great Britain should be built to a standard gauge of 4 ft 8+1&#;2 in (1,435 mm), and those in Ireland to a new standard gauge of 5 ft 3 in (1,600 mm). In Great Britain, Stephenson's gauge was chosen on the grounds that existing lines of this gauge were eight times longer than those of the rival 7 ft or 2,134 mm (later 7 ft 1&#;4 in or 2,140 mm) gauge adopted principally by the Great Western Railway. It allowed the broad-gauge companies in Great Britain to continue with their tracks and expand their networks within the "Limits of Deviation" and the exceptions defined in the Act.

After an intervening period of mixed-gauge operation (tracks were laid with three rails), the Great Western Railway finally completed the conversion of its network to standard gauge in . In North East England, some early lines in colliery (coal mining) areas were 4 ft 8 in (1,422 mm), while in Scotland some early lines were 4 ft 6 in (1,372 mm). The British gauges converged starting from as the advantages of equipment interchange became increasingly apparent. By the s, the entire network was converted to standard gauge.

The Royal Commission made no comment about small lines narrower than standard gauge (to be called "narrow gauge"), such as the Ffestiniog Railway. Thus it permitted a future multiplicity of narrow gauges in the UK. It also made no comments about future gauges in British colonies, which allowed various gauges to be adopted across the colonies.

Parts of the United States, mainly in the Northeast, adopted the same gauge, because some early trains were purchased from Britain. The American gauges converged, as the advantages of equipment interchange became increasingly apparent. Notably, all the 5 ft (1,524 mm) broad gauge track in the South was converted to "almost standard" gauge 4 ft 9 in (1,448 mm) over the course of two days beginning on 31 May .[20] See Track gauge in the United States.

In continental Europe, France and Belgium adopted a 1,500 mm (4 ft 11+1&#;16 in) gauge (measured between the midpoints of each rail's profile) for their early railways.[21] The gauge between the interior edges of the rails (the measurement adopted from ) differed slightly between countries, and even between networks within a country (for example, 1,440 mm or 4 ft 8+11&#;16 in to 1,445 mm or 4 ft 8+7&#;8 in in France). The first tracks in Austria and in the Netherlands had other gauges (1,000 mm or 3 ft 3+3&#;8 in in Austria for the Donau Moldau line and 1,945 mm or 6 ft 4+9&#;16 in in the Netherlands for the Hollandsche IJzeren Spoorweg-Maatschappij), but for interoperability reasons (the first rail service between Paris and Berlin began in , first Chaix timetable) Germany adopted standard gauges, as did most other European countries.

The modern method of measuring rail gauge was agreed in the first Berne rail convention of .[22]

Early railways by gauge

Non-standard gauge

Almost standard gauge

Standard gauge

Small deviations from standard gauge

Dual gauge

Initially standard gauge

Several lines were initially built as standard gauge but were later converted to another gauge for cost or for compatibility reasons.[citation needed]

• South Africa became

  1,067 mm

  (

  3 ft 6 in

  )
• Thailand became

  1,000 mm

  (

  3 ft 

  3

  +

  3

  &#;

  8

   in
  )
• Indonesia became

  1,067 mm

  (

  3 ft 6 in

  )
• Ireland became

  1,600 mm

  (

  5 ft 3 in

  ) &#; Dublin and Kingstown Railway
• Australia became

  1,600 mm

  (

  5 ft 3 in

  ) &#; Victoria & South Australia &#; partly converted to

  1,435 mm

  (

  4 ft 

  8

  +

  1

  &#;

  2

   in
  )
• India became

  1,676 mm

  (

  5 ft 6 in

  ) &#; initial freight lines
• some private Japanese railways

Modern almost standard gauge railways

Railways

Non-rail use

Several states in the United States had laws requiring road vehicles to have a consistent gauge to allow them to follow ruts in the road. Those gauges were similar to railway standard gauge.[61]

See also

Notes

1. ^

   The gaps in the pedestrian crossings in Pompeii could give credence or otherwise to this statement, but no relevant studies appear to have been made.

2. ^[50] 298 km (185 mi) for NSCR extensions,[51] 92 km (57 mi) for the Northeast Commuter Line to [52][53] 581 to 639 km (361 to 397 mi) for the South Main Line rehabilitation, 71 km (44 mi) for the Subic&#;Clark Railway, 244 km (152 mi) for the [54] and 175 km (109 mi) for the Tarlac&#;San Fernando line.[55] Proposed MRT lines have a total length of 370 km (230 mi), discounting the Monorail [56] while LRT Line 6's total proposed track length is 169 km (105 mi).[57] All figures mentioned denote track length, not line or system length.

   For the Philippine National Railways, 2,278 km (1,415 mi) for the Mindanao Railway, 296 km (184 mi) for the North&#;South Commuter Railway (NSCR),298 km (185 mi) for NSCR extensions,92 km (57 mi) for the Northeast Commuter Line to Cabanatuan 581 to 639 km (361 to 397 mi) for the South Main Line rehabilitation, 71 km (44 mi) for the Subic&#;Clark Railway, 244 km (152 mi) for the San Jose Tuguegarao line,and 175 km (109 mi) for the Tarlac&#;San Fernando line.Proposed MRT lines have a total length of 370 km (230 mi), discounting the Monorail Line 4 LRT Line 1 extension is 26 km (16 mi),while LRT Line 6's total proposed track length is 169 km (105 mi).All figures mentioned denote track length, not line or system length.

References

Bibliography

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