Canada chose a five-foot-six-inch gauge as a military strategy: American trains could not operate on Canadian rails. As railways proliferated and travel expanded in the s and s, the breaks in gauge presented continual problems.
A number of remedies were attempted. Eventually thousands of compromise cars were built but they only worked on some of the railways and could not bridge the gap to run on the South's five-foot rails. Rail officials were opposed to the cars because the wide wheels sometimes slipped off the rails, resulting in accidents such as the Angola, New York, disaster caused when two compromise cars derailed and the coal stoves in the cars set everything ablaze, killing forty-nine people.
Charles Tisdale tried a different approach. His invention allowed car wheels to slide along a bar so they could be manually widened or narrowed to travel on tracks of various gauges. Though it looked like a good solution, this design, too, was prone to careless handling and wear, and caused many accidents. Another solution was intended to carry narrower gauge cars over broad gauge roads and involved hoisting the narrower gauge cars onto rails placed atop broad gauge trucks.
However, this made the car top-heavy and unstable and it only worked one way; the broader gauge cars could not sit atop trucks on the narrower rails. One remedy for switching gauges was the Ramsey Car Transfer Apparatus. Instead of hoisting the cars off the trucks, the tracks were lowered and trucks with wheels of a different gauge were attached.
Some railroads used steam-powered cranes or hoists to lift cars off one set of trucks and onto another. John Imboden patented a steam powered lifter manufactured by the Richmond Car-Lifter Company that raised a car off its current truck then lowered it onto a truck with wheels of the appropriate gauge.
Though such systems could refit eight to ten cars per hour, it was still a rather slow and expensive process. Sometimes the problem was attacked at the track level.
Rather, the relevant indivisibility is that of a human being. Any technological process has to be adapted to the fact that human beings generally come only in one size, from 5 feet, 0 inches to 6 feet, 6 inches. It allowed passenger cars that seated two people in comfort on each side of an aisle wide enough for people to pass. Freight cars were large enough to accommodate the size of packages that people could carry in and stack. The equipment had a moderate degree of overhang. Hill, David P.
Morgan, and Adolf Hitler, to name three. Essentially, this interpretation is based on the fact that area-volume ratios of cylinders become more favorable as size increases. As a consequence, large boilers produce their output at a lower average cost than small ones. On a broad-gauge steam locomotive, the boiler could be larger and slung lower for greater stability. The American experience was similar. Because early American railroads were expected only to connect bodies of water that were impractical to connect with canals, there is no reason to have expected much gauge uniformity.
Early railroads did not anticipate interchange of equipment. The Pennsylvania used 4 feet, 9 inches, which was compatible. The 6 feet, 0 inches of the Erie and the Lackawanna was the most important northern broad gauge. The Canadian railways used 5 feet, 6 inches, at least in part, for military considerations. In the South, broad gauges were dominant. If there was a common gauge there, it was 5 feet, 0 inches. By , track of this gauge extended from Norfolk and Richmond to Memphis and New Orleans, although lack of some physical connections and interchange kept it from being a network.
The Civil War demonstrated the undesirability of gauge differences. Both the Union and Confederate governments encouraged interchange of equipment.
After the war, the rapid growth in grain movements from the Midwest to the East was the greatest single force for homogeneity. The Canadian lines converted to it in , and the Southern railroads began a process of conversion that ended with a massive conversion blitz on Memorial Day weekend This sporting life. Stage and screen.
Birds and the bees. IN THE 18th century, when primitive waggonways were developed for horse haulage, measurements were often made to the nearest quarter-inch and precision engineering spoke of 'bare eights'.
The early waggonways in the North-East were built to a nominal 4ft 8in which was, in contemporary practice, a perfectly rational measurement. When he was appointed engineer for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, Stephenson continued to use this gauge, as did other early promoters. However, as locomotives grew larger and required six wheels there were problems on curves and it proved easier to push the rails out the extra half-inch than to adjust the wheels.
Indeed, it is possible that the early system of track construction, where the rails were supported on stone blocks rather than cross sleepers and largely held to gauge by ballast and occasional tiebars, allowed the trains to spread the gauge as they went along. In this way a rational gauge became irrational.
Other gauges were used in England, notably Brunel's seven-foot gauge on the GWR, which lasted until YOUR correspondent seeks to conceal the darker truth.
The standard gauge, of course, is the distance between the neck and ankles of a damsel in distress. Bob Irwin, London E7.
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