Edit post

Edit your reply below.

Post Body
Enter your post below.
[quote user="blue streak 1"] Why has there not been a consideeration of the engineering factors with any guage ?  1. Starting with the "narrow guage" RRs they are easy to build in mountains   Able to go around curves much sharper than standard guage.  Look at how the D&RGW was able to serve the many mining camps west of Denver.  The narrow rails allowed for much shorter cross ties ( sleepers ). But their carrying capacity & capacity ratio to tare on each rail car was much lower than our present standard guage cars. That did allow for lighter rail.  Bridges could be built to lighter carrying capacity and tunnels smaller.[/quote] To the question of why they did not do engineering related to the choice of gage.  They did profoundly explore every conceivable engineering question pertaining to the tradeoffs between the use of one gage versus another, but they disagreed on what the engineering told them.   They particularly concentrated this analysis on the choice between 3-foot-gage and standard gage.  It led to a national debate known as the gage wars or narrow gage fever.   One thing that not everybody understands is that narrow gage was not just confined to the recent-memory systems of the western states where it was used for mountainous terrain.  That is just the left over legacy of a much wider national application which had narrow gage systems in almost every state.  The proponents of narrow gage argued that standard gage was a waste of money because it was overbuilt for the task.  There were many cases where this was true, and the narrow gage would have been viable, if not optimum.  But the more common choice of standard gage made interchange impossible for the narrow gages, and the probable growth of traffic made interchange more desirable.  So these factors squeezed out the rationale for narrow gage.  The engineering question was never settled, and it still is not settled. But the point is now moot because changing standard gage is economically impossible.     The tradeoffs between gages are astoundingly complex.  Even with a specific gage, there are many variables in the width of the rolling stock, width of trucks, center of gravity, length of rolling stock, size of rail, size of ties, spacing of ties, quality of ballast, diameter of wheels, height of rolling stock, etc.  Then when you add the variable of gage, the number of variables increases further exponentially.  Then add the uncertainty of predicting future growth of traffic, and making sure that whatever gage is committed to will be adequate in the future because changing the gage once committed is nearly impossible.
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag