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History of rail guage in UK

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OldFordMan

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Nov 19, 1996, 3:00:00 AM11/19/96
to

Hello, all!

I have a quick question of an historical nature... Can someone tell me
briefly what the standard rail gauge is in the UK and how it happened to
get set to that distance? Is it the same in the USA? If the story is too
long to post here, please send me a document or a reference to a web
site that I may go and browse would do well. But if it is short and you
think of general interest, how about posting to here and cc'ing to me by
e-mail?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Jim Cannon
Houston, Texas


Hoppy

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Nov 20, 1996, 3:00:00 AM11/20/96
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Try.......

http://www.he.tdl.com/~colemanc/Trains/st_gauge.html

______________________________________________________________________________

Paul D. Lee Division Limited
"Hoppy" 19 Apex Court, Woodlands
Bristol BS12 4JT, UK
Tel: +44 1454 615554
Fax: +44 1454 615532
Email: ho...@division.co.uk


Graham J Oliver

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Nov 20, 1996, 3:00:00 AM11/20/96
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In article <32923B...@neosoft.com>, OldFordMan <t...@neosoft.com>
writes

>I have a quick question of an historical nature... Can someone tell me
>briefly what the standard rail gauge is in the UK and how it happened to
>get set to that distance? Is it the same in the USA? If the story is too
>long to post here, please send me a document or a reference to a web
>site that I may go and browse would do well. But if it is short and you
>think of general interest, how about posting to here and cc'ing to me by
>e-mail?

"Standard Gauge" was based on the gauge used by early (17th and 18th
Century) colliery lines in the North East of England where Stephenson
and other railway pioneers lived and worked. When the Stockton &
Darlington was built in 1825 (regarded mu most railway historians as the
first "proper" railway) it used the same gauge - the original idea was
to enable colliery tubs to traverse the new railway but things changed
rapidly. Stephenson and his colleagues built other early railways to
this gauge and eventually it was adopted on the English mainland as
"Standard Gauge". Nevertheless, some still refer to it as "Stephenson's
Gauge".

Railways spread from the North East of England to most of the civilized
world and it is not surprising that foreign and colonial railway
builders adopted standard gauge - for a start there was an established
market in new and seconhand equipment to this gauge from the earliest
days.

During the early Victorian period there was a strong relationship
between Great Britain and the USA and although, American Railroads
quickly developed there own culture, there was a strong British
influence and possibly British engineering in the early days.

Ironically, British engineers elsewhere were not so steadfast in
supporting the idea of "Standard Gauge" and as a result, British
engineered railways in India, South Africa and Australia - and nearer
home in Ireland and parts of England - were built to different gauges.

Just think, if I K Brunel had been born and brought up in the North East
of England we may have seen:

a) The Great Western Railway built to standard gauge from the
outset!

b) A "Standard Gauge" of seven feet and one quarter inch - the
mind boggles ;-{D
--
Graham Oliver (GJO) GREAT CENTRAL RAILWAY PLC
"If God had intended us to fly, he wouldn't have given us the railways!"
[Michael Flanders 1965] <g...@eaton.demon.co.uk>

Jan Rehm

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Nov 20, 1996, 3:00:00 AM11/20/96
to

OldFordMan wrote:
>
> Hello, all!

>
> I have a quick question of an historical nature... Can someone tell me
> briefly what the standard rail gauge is in the UK and how it happened to
> get set to that distance? Is it the same in the USA? If the story is too
> long to post here, please send me a document or a reference to a web
> site that I may go and browse would do well. But if it is short and you
> think of general interest, how about posting to here and cc'ing to me by
> e-mail?
>
> Thanks in advance for your help.
>
> Jim Cannon
> Houston, Texas

pay a visit to

http://www.he.tdl.com/~colemanc/Trains/st_gauge.html

and you learn what the surpising reason is - the roman warhorse...

cheers

jan

Jobst Brandt

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Nov 21, 1996, 3:00:00 AM11/21/96
to

Paul Lee writes:

> Try.......

> http://www.he.tdl.com/~colemanc/Trains/st_gauge.html

At least the editor warns the reader that this is a crock of fish
plates. What is much more plausible is the story that they started
with five feet center to center on slots about four inches wide,
changed to one sided guiding of the wheel and ultimately to possibly
four feet eight inches and then realized they needed running clearance
and ended with another half inch. This more reasonable scenario may
not be the way it happened but understanding engineering development
makes this much more credible. The story of horse cars is blather.

I am also sure the carriages used were most likely horse wagons
converted for train operation that were adapted ultimately to flanged
wheels. No one recorded this and the ruts in the road scenario
doesn't hold up because anyone who worked on horse carriages can tell
you that the track varied widely for drays, surreys, and others.

Jobst Brandt <jbr...@hpl.hp.com>

Hoppy

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Nov 21, 1996, 3:00:00 AM11/21/96
to

Jan Rehm <j...@mpa-garching.mpg.de> wrote:

>
>pay a visit to
>
>http://www.he.tdl.com/~colemanc/Trains/st_gauge.html
>
>and you learn what the surpising reason is - the roman warhorse...
>

Although this is contentious. Other gauges were in use **before** standard
gauge was invented.

David Bromage

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Nov 21, 1996, 3:00:00 AM11/21/96
to

Graham J Oliver (G...@eaton.demon.co.uk) wrote:
>"Standard Gauge" was based on the gauge used by early (17th and 18th
>Century) colliery lines in the North East of England where Stephenson
>and other railway pioneers lived and worked.

4'8.5" was said to be the distance between Roman chariot wheels.

>Ironically, British engineers elsewhere were not so steadfast in
>supporting the idea of "Standard Gauge" and as a result, British
>engineered railways in India, South Africa and Australia - and nearer
>home in Ireland and parts of England - were built to different gauges.

5'3" is the Irish standard gauge, said to be the stride of Brian Berou
(sp?), and was laid extensively in Australia. In fact the Victorian
Railways and South Australian Railways laid more "broad gauge" (as they
call it) than Ireland ever did. Some of these lines (e.g. have been
converted to standard gauge in the last 2 years.

All the former colonies now known as Australia were to have their railways
built to broad gauge. Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania were all
building broad gauge lines and New South Wales was to follow suit, but the
NSW engineer had his pay cut and he resigned. He was replaced with a
British engineer who decided NSW should have standard gauge, but by this
time there were already baord gauge lines in three other colonies.
Tasmania converted to narrow gauge (3'6") on the basis oc cost, and
Western Australia and Queensland were always narrow gauge. It was not
until 1969 that Sydney and Perth were finally joined by a common gauge
(Sydney and Melbourne were linked in 1962), and the missing link between
Melbourne and Adelaide (formerly broad gauge) was not completed until
1994!

3'6" gauge, sometimes called Colonial Narrow Gauge was also pretty
standard in many of the old colonies, e.g. South Africa, New Zealand,
parts of Canada, Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania and parts of
South Australia. 3'6" has also been used extensively in Japan.


Cheers
David

Hoppy

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Nov 21, 1996, 3:00:00 AM11/21/96
to

jbr...@hpl.hp.com (Jobst Brandt) wrote:
>Paul Lee writes:
>
>> Try.......
>
>> http://www.he.tdl.com/~colemanc/Trains/st_gauge.html
>
>At least the editor warns the reader that this is a crock of fish
>plates.

Quite. And I believe I also posted to this effect that this is open ton
contention.

> What is much more plausible is the story that they started
>with five feet center to center on slots about four inches wide,
>changed to one sided guiding of the wheel and ultimately to possibly
>four feet eight inches and then realized they needed running clearance
>and ended with another half inch. This more reasonable scenario may
>not be the way it happened but understanding engineering development
>makes this much more credible. The story of horse cars is blather.
>

Both are equally likely. Just try proving it!

Equally likely also, IMHO is that they just picked a random gauge way back in
1764 on the Willington Colliery Wagonway. This is where "standard" guage was
first used, **after** other guages were already in use.

You don't know, I don't know, and I doubt anyone really knows for sure.

Bill Bedford

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Nov 22, 1996, 3:00:00 AM11/22/96
to

OldFordMan <t...@neosoft.com> wrote:

> Hello, all!
>
> I have a quick question of an historical nature... Can someone tell me
> briefly what the standard rail gauge is in the UK and how it happened to
> get set to that distance? Is it the same in the USA? If the story is too
> long to post here, please send me a document or a reference to a web
> site that I may go and browse would do well. But if it is short and you
> think of general interest, how about posting to here and cc'ing to me by
> e-mail?
>

This is something I wrote when a similar question came up on
alt.folklore.urban recently.

Joachim Lous <joa...@betelgeuze.nr.no> wrote:

> The quoted email was forwarded to me today. My guess is it has or
> will soon spread quite widely.
> There are some small holes on the argument, but I'm in no position
> to judge its general voracity. However, the conclusion part might
> easily start spreading as an UL (did you know that the US railroad
> gauge is based on the width of roman war horses' behinds?), and it
> would be nice to have documented the source. Professor O'Hare may
> have got it from somewhere else though.
> Comments?

It's half true - the real story is much more prosaic
>
> [start quoted text]
> Some Standards Live Forever
> ---------------------------
>
> The U.S. Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5
> inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?
> Because that's the way they built them in England, and the U.S. railroads
> were built by English expatriates.

Particularly the allies of George and Robert Stevenson
>
> Why did the English people build them like that? Because the first rail
> lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and
> that's the gauge they used. Why did "they" use that gauge then? Because
> the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they
> used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

So far so good......
>
> Okay! Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried
> to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long
> distance roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts.

Here we start going off the rails.....
>
> So who built these old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in
> Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The
> roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? The initial ruts, which
> everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first
> made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made for or by Imperial
> Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

and by now we've completely lost it.

The wagons on the earliest tramway in Northumberland did use components
common to other carts they made, but these carts where for the most part
two wheeled farm carts and had nothing to do with rutted roads.

During the 18th century Northumberland had seen the agricultural
revolution and many farmers had gone over to growing turnips (mangolds,
beets) as a folder crop. The method that was used was to grow the plants
on a ridge. The field would be ploughed, manure was put into the
furrows, the ridges were then formed by covering in the old manure
filled furrows and finally seeds were drilled into the tops of the
ridges.

The implements used were a two horse plough and ridging plough and one
horse manure cart and drill. The track of the horses on the ploughs was
approximately 2'6" and since the cart axle had to span a furrow and two
ridges its track was double that of the horse ie 5'.

Hence the early chauldron wagons were built with a wheel track, (the
distance between the centres of the wheels) of 5' and since the wheel
width was about 3" it gave a gauge, (the distance between the inside
faces of the wheels) of about 4'9". These tramways were all plateways,
ie the flange was on the rail, so the extra 1/2inch was taken off the
gauge of the flanges.

So had did this become a standard? One of the tramways built to these
dimensions was between the Tyne and Killingworth were a certain George
Stevenson built one of the first steam locomotives, and went on to
engineer many of the railways in Britain to his own standards.

>
> Thus, we have the answer to the original questions. The United State
> standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original
> specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. Specs and
> Bureaucracies live forever. So, the next time you are handed a
> specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be
> exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just
> wide enough to accommodate the back-ends of two war horses.
>

But it sounds a lot more romantic than "the standard railway gauge
derives from the specification of manure carts used by Northumbrian
turnip farmers".

--
Bill Bedford bi...@mousa.demon.co.uk Shetland
Brit_Rail-L list auto...@mousa.demon.co.uk
Looking forward to 2001 -
When the world is due to start thinking about the future again.

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