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[quote user="Railway Man"] Bucyrus:Your logic is sound, though I think arguing that so long as the gauge is ideally matched to its purpose the specifics of the gauge are of no matter, leaves unanswered the more important question about purpose.  Also, I am not aware that narrow-gauge created any significant stability problems.  I don't recall that in any of my old engineering texts.  Aren't there some high-speed lines that are less than standard-gauge?I agree that prior to the Civil War the technology and the industry was immature and it was not ignorant or incorrect to have reasonable differences of opinion about the prior gauge.  But by the 1870s, when the D&RG was incorporated, the technology and culture of railways was fully mature and almost the only plausible rationale for narrow-gauge was if the railway was conceived as a short-term get-rich scheme with no intent of economic development of the territory.  For a one-shot mining road like the Eureka & Palisade or White Pass & Yukon, deep in a territory that would obviously never support agriculture or manufacturing, narrow-gauge was a reasonable choice as a means to strip an ore body of its riches and withdraw.  To lay narrow-gauge in Ohio or Iowa after even 1860 was idiocy.  At that time the industry was already a half-century old and there was no excuse for being innocent of the paradigms.  It would be as if Boeing announced their 797 would be built from fabric and sprucewood spars in order to save a little bit on materials.     RWM[/quote]The stability I am referring to is the issue of increasing overhang (as a percentage of gage) as the gage is reduced.  I don't think that it was ever a practical problem because it was adequately offset by lowering the center of gravity.  The two-foot-gage lines seemed to be the ultimate test of how much overhang was possible, and I recall reading that they ran passenger trains up to 60 mph.  The issue of stability was mostly just a claim that anyone could make to support a wider gage.  Although, I also recall reading in The Main Two-Footers about a passenger train that completely tipped over while standing still on a super-elevated curve.  I do recall reading a few oblique references to the charge of narrow gage instability in the tally of wrecks published in the Railroad Gazette.  In some cases where equipment tipped over with seemingly unusual ease, they mentioned that the line was narrow gage as if to explain the accident with the implication of instability.  I agree that when I mentioned matching gage to purpose, the bigger challenge is quantifying purpose.  And purpose would also include compatibility, which naturally grows more necessary as systems develop, and ultimately usually eclipses the parts of purpose that deal with traffic, location, etc.  I would guess that if the dictates of compatibility were somehow magically suspended, American gage would have continued to grow just as all the other physical attributes of trains and tracks have.
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