What if 7ft gauge had become the standard?

[009 micro modeller]

2 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

most continentals (but not Majorca) metre gauge

 

I can’t remember - is it 3ft exactly or 900mm? I seem to remember that the Soller Railway and the tramway connected to it is still the same but the main network has now been regauged to metre gauge, though I’m not sure why this was done.

[Nearholmer]

3ft, pure and simple. Capitalised, designed, and built by British Chaps.

 

The Soller remains 3ft, presumably because it still uses its original railcars and coaches, and has no need to renew them. Its also privately owned, whereas the rest is owned by the regional authority, I think. Soller maintenance standards are phenomenal, the trains look as if they have just come new from the factory, although most are a century old.

 

The rest was converted (in fact most of it was long-closed, lifted, then much later reinstated) at metre gauge, presumably because metre gauge stock is standard production material in Spain.

 

 

 

 

Edited September 10, 2021 by Nearholmer

[MarkSG]

7 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

Suggesting it was perhaps the prototype for Ireland where three foot gauge railway  were encouraged  (as with metre gauge in France, India  and elsewhere) to try to open up poor rural regions.

 

You can get some pretty big locos and wagons on metre gauge.
 

 

[Nearholmer]

Likewise 3ft and 3ft 6in, but none of them started like that -- back in the 1870s they emerged as the lighter, crucially cheaper, alternative to SG, to serve economically thinner districts.

 

In practice, the niche that they were aimed at has actually, in the long run, best been served by 2ft 6in/750mm/760mm gauges, which seems to hit a sweet spot in terms of carrying capacity, speed capability, and cost, and can happily take SG wagons on transporters. Thus we move from Pihl to Calthrop.

 

[Stubby is going to spot shortly that we are subverting this BG thread to become one about The True Religion, i.e. narrow gauges.]

[009 micro modeller]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

Likewise 3ft and 3ft 6in, but none of them started like that -- back in the 1870s they emerged as the lighter, crucially cheaper, alternative to SG, to serve economically thinner districts.

 

In practice, the niche that they were aimed at has actually, in the long run, best been served by 2ft 6in/750mm/760mm gauges, which seems to hit a sweet spot in terms of carrying capacity, speed capability, and cost, and can happily take SG wagons on transporters. Thus we move from Pihl to Calthrop.

 

[Stubby is going to spot shortly that we are subverting this BG thread to become one about The True Religion, i.e. narrow gauges.]

 

In South Africa etc. there are some very large and powerful locos even on 2ft, which shows that in some cases you don’t even have to go up to 2ft 6in (though I do agree in general with your point - lots of European secondary lines use 750/760/762mm). I always understood the increasingly large locos on 3ft 6in and metre gauge, especially in Africa, to be the legacy of the original lines being constructed lightly and cheaply but later needing to serve more and heavier traffic - several African countries that are now able to invest in their railways are replacing or supplementing their colonial narrow gauge networks with entirely new standard gauge lines. However, in South Africa the first railway was actually standard gauge, later regauged (and they did also have a 7ft gauge breakwater/harbour construction railway, I think). Similarly in New Zealand the first line was 5ft 3in, later regauged.

 

On the subject of broad gauge, I suspect that 5ft doesn’t really offer any particular advantages or disadvantages compared to standard gauge but what about 5ft 6in? And there were some railways with gauges around 6ft as well.

Edited September 10, 2021 by 009 micro modeller

[Pacific231G]

3 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Likewise 3ft and 3ft 6in, but none of them started like that -- back in the 1870s they emerged as the lighter, crucially cheaper, alternative to SG, to serve economically thinner districts.

 

In practice, the niche that they were aimed at has actually, in the long run, best been served by 2ft 6in/750mm/760mm gauges, which seems to hit a sweet spot in terms of carrying capacity, speed capability, and cost, and can happily take SG wagons on transporters. Thus we move from Pihl to Calthrop.

 

[Stubby is going to spot shortly that we are subverting this BG thread to become one about The True Religion, i.e. narrow gauges.]

According to WJK Davies the French orgiinally specified 750mm as well as Metre gauge but, after its success in carrying passengers at one of the Paris exhibitions,  Paul Decauville persuaded them to allow his 60cm instead. The few public railways he then built to that gauge (Pithiviers-Toury, Calvados, Royan and a couple of others) weren't particularly successful and though probably OK for short runs,  for longer journeys they must have been, with the suspension of that time,  pretty uncomfortable. The several hundred mile long French military railways across Morocco must have been hellish. Metre gauge was cheaper to build but the fact that several were later fairly easily converted to standard gauge suggests that they weren't that much lighter. OTOH the Austrian 760mm gauge was a lot cheaper to build so railways weren't saddled with so much debt and it seems to have achieved more or less the same as metre gauge at lower cost.

I agree about sweet spots where costs of construction, possible speed and carrying capacity are well balanced. Around five feet seems to be one which is why SG and similar gauges make up most of the world's railways and it's interesting that when it came to high speed lines the Japanese went for SG, which made them incompatible with the rest of their 3ft 6in network (unlike say the TGVs that also use the classic network)  but didn't opt for a wider gauge which they presumably could have done. I think that for common carrying NG railways, about half that, i.e. two foot six gauge or thereabouts seems to be another sweet spot. The carriages arent uncomfortably cramped and the goods wagons  can carry a decent load (including a standard gauge wagon if the structure gauge allows it) whereas with two foot gauge, carriages are cramped - you tend to get a lot of longitudinal benches facing each other, and wagons are small.  The fact that the military railways of the First World War's western front, though they made considerable use of 60cm forward lines, still pushed the SG as far forward as they could seems significant.   

 

As to broader gauges, For their five foot gauge the Russians seem to use similar width stock as most UIC SG lines but the Indian Railways do seem to have made some use of their wider gauge to have more generously proportioned passenger carriages than even N. America but rather less for freight wagons. 

I've got a copy of the British military handbook for railway constructino and that does give relative figures for material and manpower for Indian BG, SG and metre gauge railways- I'm not sure so I'll maybe look that up tomorrow

 

Edited September 11, 2021 by Pacific231G

[Nearholmer]

6 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

The fact that the military railways of the First World War's western front, though they made considerable use of 60cm forward lines, still pushed the SG as far forward as they could seems significant.   

Noticeable too that the Germans, who were the only ones to get really serious about narrow gauge railways in the Second World War, chose then to use 750mm gauge, which they deployed in a sort of combination role of “long supply line” and “proto-colonial”, rather than as short distance tactical support. 
 

A great deal of 2WK HFB material was subsequently used on public common carrier railways, and some of the loco designs were such that they could pull whopper loads.

 

Of course, we have at least one ex HFB loco in the U.K., Sir Drefaldwyn on the W&LLR, and I think some of the South Tynedale locos might be to HFB designs, but built postwar in Poland.

 

This monster was used in Bosnia.

 

 

Edited September 11, 2021 by Nearholmer

[DenysW]

I hope that this helps with the original topic ...

 

We can't ask Churchward what he thought of the opportunities offered by the original Broad Gauge loading gauge, but he did record (below) his barely concealed envy at the power of engine available in the US to users of the US loading gauge on Standard Gauge, which I believe is close. Source: Institute of Civil Engineers vol 154 (1903) pp 80-107. Sadly they indexed him as Churchyard for this entry.

 

[melmerby]

Maybe the title of this topic should have been "What if the GWR's original loading gauge had become standard" (15' 0" x 11' 6")

That way we could have locos and rolling stock comparable to the US.

 

E.G. N&W J class No. 611 is 16' 0" x 11' 2" and has 27" x 32" cylinders and produces 80000 lbs TE with 5' 10"" wheels.

It does however put 33T onto the driving wheels

[DenysW]

I  agree, but that's with hindsight. It would also have avoided all of the re-raking of ancient ground on BG vs SG vs NG in this thread.

 

A separate topic is "What if IKB had coped Stephenson by having the same 7' spacing between the sets of rails as between the rails themselves?". Probably not much extra cost until you came to tunnels.

[DenysW]

I think the answer to the OT is that an isolated outpost of 7-ft gauge, 11'6" loading gauge would have looked like a larger, more powerful version of the London, Tilbury & Southend Railway. Tank-engines only, maybe 4-4-2 for passenger with 6'6" dia wheels, and 2-6-4 with 5' wheels for freight and mixed-traffic. No real need for tender engines as side-tanks can have so much more water in them with the generous loading gauge, and the maximum journey is presumably around 50 miles. 5 tons of coal, 5,000 gallons of water in the biggest locos. No needs for Kings or Castles as the journeys are sufficiently short so speed is not of the essence.

 

If Brunel's love of wooden tressle-bridges had been followed in the original build, then when they were replaced in 1880-1910 the track could be upgraded to 25 or even 30 tons/axle, and du Bousquets used on the tin and lead mining and the china clay, assuming that the mines are up steep, winding roads.

 

Other than that, it's what the OT wants to specify as the railway built on his imaginary Lyonesse to serve its needs at a profit.

[Pacific231G]

Going back to the OT's oriignal question. Had 7ft become the standard gauge I suspect that the increased construction costs would have left us with a basic intercity network and not much else. It's likely that feeder and branch lines would have made far more use of narrower gauges,  as happened in countries such as India in territories where the cost of even standard gauge (in India's case 1676mm) was not financially viable. Had that happened, the resulting extra costs and delays of transhipment would probably have led to them not surviving against road transport for very long.

 

Going back to my 1940 military railway manuals, the authors are very clear that, though a narrow gauge line can be pushed forward more quickly and with fewer resources, the far greater capacity of a standard gauge line still made that the normally preferred option. If a line would make a direct connection with an existing railways then a different gauge might be called for but otherwise a SG line would be the preferred option with an optimum balance between construction "costs" (in times of war, manpower and the shipping needed for material rather than cash costs) and the carrying capacity to serve a campaign.

[DenysW]

Pacific231G's view of the past is valid, but I think it is one extreme. As extensively debated in this thread, 7' gauge requires somewhat more gentle curves which adds appreciably to cost - Brunel asserted that just the extra width was cheap, and this does feel correct. 11'6 " loading gauge allows much more powerful locomotives. There isn't anything in it for gradients: both start looking silly steeper than (about) 1 in 40.  Arguably the loading gauge power gains trump the extra costs for the curves: would we still be debating the Lickey Bank, the Worsborough Incline, or the South Devon Banks if they'd all be in Brunel's gauge and loading gauge and served by locomotives that used it to the full?

 

So we might well have had the present intercity network via a different pathway. More steep inclines, but fewer duplicate lines just built because two warring companies couldn't come to agreement. Did we really need both Great Eastern's lines and the M&GN joint? And the GWR's line and the S&D Joint, or the M&LSW Joint? And don't start me on Heads of Valleys.

 

As a specific example, it was George Stephenson's insistence on 1:330 maximum incline that drove the North Midland Railway nearly into insolvency - using standard gauge.