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[quote user="Murphy Siding"]      The other thing that keeps popping up is the narrow gauge issue.  As I read it, railroads built narrow gauge to save money.  They could build them cheaper, with tighter turns, and apparantly(?) steeper grades(?)  Later, when some of the lines were standard gauged, it would seem like an engineering mess on some of the lines.  I'm not sure how you'd retroactively fix tight turns and steep grades.[/quote] Converting lines from narrow to standard gage was a mess, but so was the realignment and general upgrades made to many standard gage lines as their business took off.I have some random thoughts about the choice of gage, starting with my belief that there is no gage that is fundamentally superior or inferior to any other as long as it is ideally matched to its purpose.  Eventually a consensus developed around a gage of 56-1/2" to meet the average purpose.  In the beginning, however, everybody had a different idea about what the ideal gage should be.  Some thought 56-1/2" was too narrow, and some thought 24" was wide enough.The argument simply revolved around matching the capacity of the plant (the size of train and track) to the transportation job.  Excessive size/capacity was deemed a waste of resources.  The decision was exacerbated by not knowing what the future need would be, considering the inflexibility of changing gage once a line was built.  Because railroads provide for long, self-guiding vehicles, if you have a choice in making the vehicle wide or narrow, it makes sense to make it narrow.  To carry the same load in a wider, but shorter vehicle requires a wider track all the way, and the majority of the plant cost is in the track and earthwork.  Thus the motive was to achieve the largest train capacity on the narrowest track and roadbed.  Therefore, as the gage concept narrowed, the tendency was to narrow the track disproportionately more than the train.  The resulting increase in overhang led to charges by the larger gage advocates that narrow gage had problems with stability.  In fact the objective of stability seems to have played a big part in the choice of gages of six feet or more, which was seen as a way to minimize overhang as much as its ability to increase capacity.  This broad gage school regarded 56-1/2" as narrow gage, and argued against it just as the 56-1/2" advocates argued against gages such as 36."The plot really thickened when railroads became so numerous that they connected, and thus found the advantage of interchangeability as an alternative to breaking bulk.  Then with that development, in addition to the objective of matching the scale of the plant to the size of the task, there was the hope of choosing a gage that would eventually become standard with all other lines, coupled with the speculation about what that consensus gage would end up being.  So, not only was building a railroad faced with the difficulty of financing and construction, but also it required the commitment to selecting a gage that not only matched its transportation task at the time of construction and into the future, but also matched the anticipated future gage of its interchanging lines.
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