The American Railroad Network, 1861-1890

The title of this 83 page book is such that the typical reader could be forgiven for assuming they were looking at a dry, technical exposition whose only possible saving grace might be an offering of enough factual information to allow one to thoroughly debunk the hoary internet urban legend concerning Roman chariot wheel ruts and horses asses as the “military specification” which supposedly dictated the current standard track gauge of 4 feet 8 and one half inches.

While the facts presented in this volume do, incidentally, put paid to that story the focus of the book is the history of the evolution of a technological standard.

The initial focus of railroad construction in the U.S. was on maintaining markets in narrowly defined show more economic spheres. Thus cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore built railroads to permit rapid movement of goods to local markets and to keep these local markets tied to the interest of the larger city which controlled the railroad. There was no interest in long distance commerce and no one could see any benefit in connecting one railroad from one large city to that of another railroad in another city. As part of the interest in maintaining control of the local markets the various cities made it a point to have different gauges in order to keep the competition at bay. The end result was almost as many track gauges as there were cities building railroads with the gauges spanning the range from 4 feet 3 inches to 6 feet.

It was only when cities and railroad builders began to realize there was an economic benefit to interchange that they began to think about gauge standardization. The advent of the American Civil War further encouraged their thinking in this direction and, as is often the case with many adopted standards, the choice of 4 feet 8 and one half inches as the American standard gauge, was determined largely by the fact of majority rule – at the time the decision was made to standardize more track had been laid to that particular gauge than any of the others.

Before standardization, but after it had become apparent that interchange traffic was economically worthwhile, numerous attempts were made to allow for interchange across gauges. Four that held the most promise were wheels with very wide tread, interchange points that removed one set of trucks from under freight and passenger cars and replaced them with a different gauge, track with three rails to allow different gauged cars to run in the same train, and cars with movable wheels. All are described in the book and their pros and cons (mainly cons) discussed.

I think the book is well written and provides an interesting study of the problems involved in the development and implementation of an industrial standard. (Text length - 83 pages, Total length 113 pages show less