A brief history of Standard Gauge

[zardoz]

This is from a website called "Truth or Fiction". I find it quite useful in regards to stories circulated around the web, as well as info about computer viruses..

Here is their URL: http://www.truthorfiction.com/

And the URL for the below article:
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/r/railwidth.htm
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Summary of the eRumor
This story is a "We've always done it that way" tale. It says that the standard distance between railroad rails in the U.S. is four-feet, eight-and-a-half inches. Why? Because that's what it was in England. Why? Because that's the gauge the tramways used before the railroads. Why? Because the tramways were built using the same tools as wagon-builders and that's how wide the wagon wheels were spaced. Why? Because the old roads in England had ruts that the wheels needed to accommodate. Why? Because the ruts were made by Imperial Roman chariots.


The Truth
There is no evidence that we could find that this is true.
In an article on www.railway.org by D. Gabe Gabriel says this tale has existed since shortly after World War II but that history does not support the claims of the story. The Roman ruts, according to Gabriel, were not for chariots but for narrow, hand-pulled carts. Although there are many places where the ruts are visible, Gabriel questions that they played a role in English railroad standards 1400 years after the last Roman legions. One of the claims of the eRumor is that the width of the ruts was affected by the need to make the chariot and it's wheels the same width as the combined rears of the horses pulling them. Gabriel says there's a statue by Franzoni in the Vatican museum that is regarded as the most accurate known depiction of a Roman chariot. The two horses are wider than the chariot and the chariot wheels behind them.

Where did the four-foot, eight-and-a-half-inch standard originate? Gabriel says it was from a Englishman named George Stephenson. Carts on rails had been used in mines in England for years, but the width of the rails varied from mine to mine since they didn't share tracks. Stephenson was the one who started experimenting with putting a steam engine on the carts so there would be propulsion to pull them along. He had worked with several mines with differing gauges and simply chose to make the rails for his project 4-foot, eight inches wide. He later decided that adding another six inches made things easier. He was later consulted for constructing some rails along a roadway and by the time broader plans for railroads in Great Britain were proposed, there were already 1200 miles of his rails so the "Stephenson gauge" became the standard.

Interestingly, the 4-foot, eight-and-a-half inch width has not always been the standard in the U.S. According to the Encyclopedia of American Business History and Biography, at the beginning of the Civil War, there were more than 20 different gauges ranging from 3 to 6 feet, although the 4-foot, eight-and-a-half inch was the most widely used. During the war, any supplies transported by rail had to be transferred by hand whenever a car on one gauge encountered track of another gauge and more than 4,000 miles of new track was laid during the war to standardize the process. Later, Congress decreed that the 4-foot, eight-and-a-half inch standard would be used for transcontinental railway.


Just thought you might like to know.......

[rrnut282]

Nay saying a popular belief could get you branded a heretic. I used the chariot explanantion many times, but wasn't 100% sure it was correct. Not until time travel is routine and someone goes back and observes the process will we be sure about anything like this. My neck of the woods had both ends of the gage spectrum. The Cloverleaf (became a Nickel Plate line) was built as 3 foot narrow-gage. They set a record by standard gaging almost the width of the state of Indiana in one day. The Erie passed close by and they liked wide gage and deeeep ballast.

[vsmith]

I have alway heard it had more to do with the existing horse-cart railroads in England and the owners of said RR's not wanting to pull up and relay many miles of existing track, so Stevenson simply adopted the gauge most common of his potential clients, 4'-8 1/2". The client-sponsor of his " Rocket" owned a coal line that was 4'-8 1/2" gauge.