Large Scale Central

Railroad Tracks & Politics

General Discussion
#1

Railroad tracks. This is fascinating. Be sure to read the final paragraph; your understanding of it will depend onthe earlier part of the content.

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.

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? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England ) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome , they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge
of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification / Procedure /Process and wonder ‘What horse’s ass came up with it?’ you may be exactly right.
Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses’ asses.) Now, the twist to the
story:

When you 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 SRB’s. The SRB’s are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRB’s would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB’s had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run
through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRB’s had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years
ago by the width of a horse’s ass.

And you thought being a horse’s ass wasn’t important? Ancient horse’s asses control almost everything… and CURRENT Horses Asses are controlling everything else.

#2

I love that explanation: It’s much more colorful than the truth :smiley:

In the early 1800’s railways had proved quite useful in England, however there was a headache. At junctions, everything had to be unloaded and loaded onto another train to continue on. An engineer (not a driver) suggested, “How 'bout if we made everything to a standard and just roll the train cars from one train to another?”

So he proposed a set of standards for track width, materials, power – until then some railways were horse powered – and so on. Now, at this time they had already figured out that the wheel didn’t need a flange on both the inside and the outside, but they hadn’t figured out that the flange works best on the inside until he had most of his standard gauge track laid. To solve that problem, he just turned the wheels around when he mounted them on the axels, and measured the inside distance instead of the outside.

If you take a tape measure out to your local standard gauge railroad and measure the rails outside to outside, you’ll get another odd measurement, 5 ft 2 inches. You see, the rails themselves are an inch thicker these days than when standard gauge was first proposed at — 5 ft.

#3

Herb and Tom, thank you. Horses’ asses and reversible wheel flanges are not topics I normally ponder upon. What a great start to the day!

#4

I actually wrote a book partly about the invention of standard time, called “Keeping Watch.” It’s partly about how the railroads established standard time zones. I did a lot of work on standardization as a historical phenomenon. There not much demand for standardization anywhere before around 1750, then 100 years later standardization is the rule. Most of the time standards have little or no logic to them, they just follow the custom of whoever is the biggest player in the game. Why is Greenwich the “zero point” for time zones? Because England was the big dog at the time. The French wanted Paris, the US wanted DC; there was a proposal by scientists to make the apex of the great pyramid of Cheops the zero point.

There’s a classic book in US business history called “The Visible Hand,” by Alfred Chandler, that argues that the most important guys in the development of the US economy are the middle managers, not the famous guys like Rockefeller or Vanderbilt or Carnegie. It’s the middle managers who work out the standards that make everything flow right–engineering standards, standards for signaling and gage, standards for switching procedures, etc. Most of the time those standards are worked out by guys you never hear about

#5

Hey Mike, that means you know all about Sandford Fleming :slight_smile:

#6

Herb’s storry is at least partially correct: Originally, various gauges were used in the United States and Canada. Some railways, primarily in the northeast, used standard gauge; others used gauges ranging from 4 ft (1,219 mm) to 6 ft (1,829 mm). Given the nation’s recent independence from the United Kingdom, arguments based on British standards had little weight. Problems began as soon as lines began to meet and in much of the north-eastern United States, standard gauge was adopted. Most Southern states used 5 ft (1,524 mm) gauge. Following the American Civil War, trade between the South and North grew and the break of gauge became a major economic nuisance. Competitive pressures had forced all the Canadian railways to convert to standard gauge by 1880, and Illinois Central converted its south line to New Orleans to standard gauge in 1881, putting pressure on the southern railways.

After considerable debate and planning, most of the southern rail network was converted from 5 ft (1,524 mm) gauge to 4 ft 9 in (1,448 mm) gauge, then the standard of the Pennsylvania Railroad (the largest RR in the country at the time), over two remarkable days beginning on Monday, May 31, 1886. Over a period of 36 hours, tens of thousands of workers pulled the spikes from the west rail of all the broad gauge lines in the South, moved them 3 inches (76 mm) east and spiked them back in place. The new gauge was close enough that standard gauge equipment could run on it without problem. By June, 1886, all major railroads in North America were using approximately the same gauge. The final conversion to true standard gauge took place gradually as track was maintained.

In modern uses certain isolated occurrences of non-standard gauges can still be found, such as the 5 ft 2¼ in (1,581 mm) and 5 ft 2½ in (1,588 mm) gauge tracks of the Philadelphia streetcars, the Philadelphia subway cars and the New Orleans streetcars. The Bay Area Rapid Transit system in the San Francisco Bay Area, chose 5 ft 6 in (1,676 mm) gauge. The San Francisco cable cars use a gauge of 3 ft 6 in (1,067 mm).

#7
Hans-Joerg Mueller said:
Hey Mike, that means you know all about [url=http://inventors.about.com/od/fstartinventors/a/SandfordFleming.htm]Sandford Fleming[/url] :)
He's in the book! There are a lot of arguments bout who gets to be called "the father of Standard Time." There were a number of people advocating a zone system for the US in the 1860s, including meteorologists. Fleming was extremely active and influential in the international community and he could plausibly be called the father of international standard time. An impressive, guy, Fleming
#8
Roger Crooks said:
Following the American Civil War, trade between the South and North grew and the break of gauge became a major economic nuisance.
That phenomenon lasted quite a bit longer in Australia. From memory, of Australia's six states, only New South Wales was using standard gauge when I first emigrated in the early '70s. Victoria and South Australia were broad gauge, Western Australia and Queensland were narrow gauge as was (I think) Tasmania.

There’s a lot more standard gauge track now, but it’s still not uncommon to see three rails in WA, so both standard and narrow gauge stock can operate.