On Thu, Dec 28, 2000 at 10:06:33AM -0800, Edward Craig wrote:
>
> Off topic to be sure, but I couldn't resist...
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>
>PROGRESS
>
>The U.S. standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5
>inches. That is an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?
>
>Because that's the way they built them in England, & the U.S. railroads were
>built by English expatriates.
>
I've heard this one before, but it's not quite on.
Railroads in Australia, also built by .uk engineers, are plagued by gauge
incompatibility problems; each coastwise colony had its own rail project,
with its own gauge. The same thing afflicted early .us railroads; this sort
of problem persisted until the Civil War, which resulted both in consolidation
of the railroads into a few major corporations, and in the frequent tearing
up and rebuilding of a sizeable fraction of .us trackage, a subject at which
the Corps of Engineers became quite proficient.
The "chariot width" premise is not entirely off, however, given that most
early track-based systems (in mines, eg) were designed for horse power, so
the horse's ass is still the driving force in gauge formation.
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