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[quote user="John WR"] [quote user="Bucyrus"]I understand your answer, but I meant to stipulate that you would be selecting your railroad gage at a time when no other railroad existed anywhere as a potential gage precedent.  You would be the first to build a railroad and select the best gage.  And you would then connect every town with that railroad[/quote] Bucyrus,   I accept your point.  If I were in charge of a country's railroads and had no precedent to guide my I don't know what gauge I would choose.  But whatever gauge I did choose it would be the same for all railroads in the country.   Of course, here in the US the Federal Government ignored railroads up to the late 1880's except for the Civil War and the transcontinentals.  So there was no national leadership from government.  Ultimately the leadership both for a standard gauge and for time zones came from the railroads themselves.   John[/quote] John, I think it would take government to establish a standard gage simply because only government would have the power to mandate it, and the choice of a standard gage could only come about through a mandate.  If it were my country, I don’t know what gage I would choose either.  Based on my best hunch, it should be something around five feet. Hilton, in his book on narrow gage railroads, says that while the choice for standard gage was made as a practical matter, the intellectual problem of choosing the correct gage has never been resolved. Government mandated our gage without answering the intellectual question.   They just mandated what was at the time, the most popular gage.  The intellectual problem of correct gage is enormously complex and also requires the factoring of accurate input from the future.  It is an interesting problem because it is so important for transportation efficiency, and yet practically impossible to know for sure.  Nothing like it occurs in any other transportation mode.    But once you get in the ballpark of the intellectually proper gage, the issue of gage commonality becomes more important due to the economics of interchangeability.  So maybe “good enough” is good enough.    Nevertheless, you have probably heard the quote by the president of the Burlington Northern:   “If I were asked to teach a class on railway track construction and maintenance, I’d start with the first precept of the railway civil engineer—‘never forget that the tracks of American railroads are too narrow.’  They were built to a gauge of 4 feet, 8 ½ inches.  But if we had it to do all over again we’d probably build them with the rails at least 6 feet apart.”   The wisdom of that statement seems to be demonstrated by the fact that our railroads are maxed out in terms of car capacity, and can only resort to longer trains to increase train loads.
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