The standard U.S. railroad width 4'/8 1/2 inches?

Question

There must have been some reason 'back then' to make it 4'/8" wide, but why the 'extra' 1/2 inch

Answer 1

Here are 2 answers. Take your pick.


The U.S. Standard Railroad Gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8-1/2 inches or 56-1/2 inches. Now that's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that width chosen? Our research will tell you why.

The U.S. purchased their first railroad engines from England who designed & built them using expatriate engineers. Their first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge (width) they used. The tramways used the same jigs and tooling they used for building wagons which used the same wheel spacing. All other wagon manufactures used the same wheel width.

The wagons wheel ruts would ware into the roads making it impossible for any other wheel width to navigate roads both in Europe & England. The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The same thoroughfares have been used ever since.

The initial ruts were first made by Roman war chariots. These chariots were designed to be pulled by two horses hitched side by side. The chariot wheels had to be spaced far enough apart to avoid the hoof marks left by the horses, yet not protrude past the flanks of the horses to prevent entanglement with opposing traffic or roadside vegetation. Since all chariots were made by Imperial Rome and they were all alike. Thus, we have the answer to the original question based upon our insistent research completed by the the VLC Line Engineers.

The United States Standard Railroad Gauge of 4 feet, 8-1/2 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. Two thousand years later and a continent away, the track layout of most of the U.S. railway network is based upon the fact that Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the rear-ends of two war horses. This is proof that Specs and bureaucracies live forever. So, the next time you are handed a specification just wonder if a couple of horse's behind's caused it, and you may be exactly right. ha~ha!!


The Width of Railroad Tracks is based on a History that Extends Back to Roman Chariots-Fiction!






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.

Answer 2

It goes back way before the first railways.

In the UK in the 1700s, the first form of mass freight land transport was by waggon way. The earliest waggon ways were constructed so that the waggon could also be used on the highway. The standard distance between waggon wheels was four feet eight and a half inches.

As waggon ways developed, specialised wagons were built, so that when the railway came along, the same width was used for the track.

The railways in the USA and most of the British Empire replicated this gague.

However, the more efficent gague is the seven foot gague devloped by Brunel for the Great Western Railway. A broader gague allows higher speeds to be achieved without banking and permits the use of wider rolling stock.

Answer 3

It doesn't matter what the gauge is... what matters is who else uses it.

Having a "different" gauge means that your cars can't roll through onto other people's lines, so you will have great expense at transloading cargo onto other cars. In the U.S. Civil War, the South was at disadvantage because their railroads had all chosen different gauges, and railroads in the Union had mostly standardized. During Reconstruction, the entire South was regauged to standard in 2 days.

On the other hand, both countries and companies have deliberately chosen oddball gauges, to deter invaders or hostile takeovers. Russia is 5'0", and Philadelphia and Toronto streetcar lines are 4'10-7/8" or something crazy like that. San Francisco BART chose 5'6".

It also means you'll pay extra for any railroad equipment you buy, and extra for contractors to work on your track because their equipment won't fit.

So the fact is, there was a "gauge war" in the first 50 years of railroading, with all sorts of goofy gauges being tried. It just so happened that 56.5" (1435.1mm) won.

Answer 4

It was the width of a cart pulled by two horses.

Answer 5

it's the average width of two horses, it goes back to when people rode around in chariots.