Question about train track sizes

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tomhugill
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Re: Question about train track sizes

Post by tomhugill »

Mick, if you think that's narrow, check out South African railways, theyre 3ft 6 gauge, which is technically narrow gauge. Their locomotives are huge!

Image

The tractive effort is nearly double the most powerful UK (none articulated) locomotive the Princess Corniatoon at nearly 80000lb!
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tomhugill
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Re: Question about train track sizes

Post by tomhugill »

Son of a gun-ner wrote:
tomhugill wrote:Mick, if you think that's narrow, check out South African railways, theyre 3ft 6 gauge, which is technically narrow gauge. Their locomotives are huge!

Image

The tractive effort is nearly double the most powerful UK (none articulated) locomotive the Princess Corniatoon at nearly 80000lb!
WOW, that's ridiculous, must have to crawl around bends.

Mick.
Not necessarily, track is canted so the train wouldn't be thrown off the curve by going too fast.
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wibblywobbly
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Re: Question about train track sizes

Post by wibblywobbly »

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.

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its
launch pad, there are two big booster rockets
attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These
are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are
made by Thiokol at their factory at Utah. The
engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred
to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to
be shipped by train from the factory to the launch
site. The railroad line from the factory happens to
run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had
to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly
wider than the railroad track, and the railroad
track, as you now know, is about as wide as two
horses’ behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what
is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation
system was determined over two thousand years ago by
the width of a horse’s ass. … and you thought
being a HORSE’S ASS wasn’t important!
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jackalope
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Re: Question about train track sizes

Post by jackalope »

The width is the width that the wheels of the Romen chariots were apart, or the width of 2 horses asses. LOL! We laugh about that all the time at work, ya know being my work is the railroad. :haha:

Also the width is measured from the inside edge to inside edge of the rails.

If you like i can ask the track department what the exact measurements are tomorrow.
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