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Marking 125 Years Since the Great Gauge Change
Arnold Reinhold writes "This month ends with the 125th anniversary of one of the most remarkable achievements in technology history. Over two days beginning Monday, May 31, 1886, the railroad network in the southern United States was converted from a five-foot gauge to one compatible with the slightly narrower gauge used in the US North, now know as standard gauge. The shift was meticulously planned and executed. It required one side of every track to be moved three inches closer to the other. All wheel sets had to be adjusted as well. Some minor track and rolling stock was sensibly deferred until later, but by Wednesday the South's 11,500 mile rail network was back in business and able to exchange rail cars with the North. Other countries are still struggling with incompatible rail gauges. Australia still has three. Most of Europe runs on standard gauge, but Russia uses essentially the same five foot gauge as the old South and Spain and Portugal use an even broader gauge. India has a multi-year Project Unigauge, aimed at converting its narrow gauge lines to the subcontinent's five foot six inch standard."
It needs to be done once again when larger areas want to connect. And then continents. And again until we actually get the whole world to use the same. And by that time trains are obsolete already.
Did they have to go on a training course? :0)
The purpose of existence is to make money.
In the second half of the 19th century the US took rail transit very seriously. The standardization of the gauge isn't the only example of this. The US also spent a large amount of effort building the transcontinental railroad. A major reason for the success of the United States in the 20th century was the massive investment in infrastructure in the end of the 19th. Unfortunately, the US hasn't done much in the way of large scale infrastructural improvement since the building of the highway system in the 1950s. Our electric grid is primitive and outdated and our fastest passenger trains like the Acela high speed rail on the East Coast are slower than regular trains in other places like Japan (the maximum speed of the Acela is less than the average speed for some of the Japanese trains). I'm deeply worried about what the next few years are going to be like.
"Standard Gauge is thin. Standard Gauge is beautiful. Standard Gauge goes anywhere and lasts all day. There’s not right way or wrong way. It’s crazy powerful. It’s magical. You already know how to use it. It’s 11,500 miles of track and counting. All the worlds” interchanges in your hands. It’s 4 ft. 9 in., standard. More rail than you could ride in a lifetime. It’s already a revolution and it’s only just begun."
Metric. Date format. IPv6. 240v 50Hz. Not many left to go, Americans.
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Over two days beginning Monday, May 31, 1886, the railroad network in the southern United States was converted
Isn't that something like 21 years after they lost "The War of Northern Aggression" known by Ken Burns and the yankees as "The Civil War"?
Give me 21 years to pre-plan and pre-position supplies and workers and I can probably pull 11500 miles of CAT-5 in 2 days.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It seems like any time there was a curved track section, it wouldn't work to just move it in 3 inches since the old piece would be to long or too short (depending on which way the curve was going). Not sure exactly how frequent this is, but I would think there would be quite a few to replace in 11,000+ miles of track. That would actually be interesting to me since you would have to have all the new pieces ready and on site (since you couldn't move them with the track torn up) waiting for that day.
"This month ends with the -125th anniversary of one of the most remarkable achievements in the technology future. Over two days beginning Monday, May 31, 2136, the gui manager for the linux desktop was converted from the old-earth version one to one compatible with the slightly narrower one used in the space federation. The shift was meticulously planned and executed. It required one side of every gui to be moved three inches closer to the other. All font sets had to be adjusted as well. Some minor animations and rolling stock were sensibly deferred until later, but by Wednesday, the 11,500 megaline code base was back in business and able to exchange screenshots with the rest of the world. Other operating systems are still struggling with incompatible interfaces. MicrApple still has two. Most of the solar system runs linux, but the outer planets use essentially the same gui gauge as old earth and CmdrTaco and timothy use an even broader gui size. Alpha centari has a multi-year Project Unigui, aimed at converting its narrow gui lines to the federation's five foot six inch standard."
Does having a witty signature really indicate normality?
Standard Gauge is NOT 4ft 9in.
IT IS Frigging 4ft 8.5in. OK.
Outside of rail circles, this is the FIRST time I have heard the Great Gauge Change mentioned. I am quite shocked really.
and that is the 7ft 0.25in of Brunel's GWR.
anything else is just a sham.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Is it just me or is it a little amusing that the guy who was telling them that the 4 ft. 9 in. gauge wasn't necessarily a good idea was named John C. Gault?
I wonder if Ayn Rand had any idea.
Convert them all from feet to centimeters :)
Privacy is terrorism.
Railroad's advantage is in lower friction than rubber tire on cement. That is maximized with slow freight railroads, which the United States has among the best in the world. Most of the energy losses at ~200 mph, are aerodynamic, not friction. Rail does not help there.
Also, high speed transport, including all air transportation, is a fraction of the boring highways. Less than 1 percent of freight travels by air. High speed transportation is more of a luxury. I thus think it is quite logical for the United States not to have high speed rail.
Anything bigger and I just can fit it in the basement !!
Or I'd have to dig up the bodies !!
Now let's see this applied to the Japanese grid (60/50Hz split).
How did they get the work done on time? How many people were involved?
11,500 miles/track is around 32 million railroad spikes that have to be pulled and respiked in the new location. If it takes one person 20 seconds to pull a spike and rehammer it in, it would take a crew of 16,000 people working 16 hour shifts to do the work in 3 days. And this is only the guys that are doing the spiking, it ignores the thousands of others that would be involved in moving (and lengthening/shorting curved sections when necessary) the rails, altering the running stock gauge and handling the supply logistics for materials, food, water, housing, etc for these large teams. So maybe 20,000 - 25,000 workers were involved?
meters meters meters
(Sorry my bad French) Je fais parler les Guignols de l'Info. Le pied, quoi.
I'd like to know which country has an electric grid that makes the US grid look primitive. Japan still has the 50/60Hz split, the US grid has been 60Hz only since 1948 (albeit there are remnants of 25HZ systems for railway/electrochemical use). Haven't heard anything about Europe that makes it superior to the US. China might have an edge due to the newness of their infrastructure.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
The fact that the old Soviet trains ran on a non-standard gauge was a contributing factor to the survival of the Soviet Union from the German blitzkrieg. Germany was not able to immediately use the Soviet rail system to reinforce and supply its troops, and was faced with having to use a few captured locomotives while re-engineering the Soviet rail system to accommodate German trains. Because of this most of the supplies needed by the army had to be shipped by road, except there are a few months out of the year when Russian roads turned into rivers of mud...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Those now living in a modern peaceful and standardised regions of the world, should not forget how having different rail systems would be an excellent tactical choice during war times, as an invading country could not directly and effectively make use of the invaded host's rail system to move troops, equipment and supplies.
I'd like to know which country has an electric grid that makes the US grid look primitive.
I don't think it's so much that the US grid is primitive compared to other countries. Rather it is primitive compared with the available technology and projected needs. The monitoring and control equipment on much of the grid remains rather primitive, the wire infrastructure is fragile (major outages every time a serious storm blows through), many areas still depend on sending a person out to read the meter for billing, there is a too much interdependence without adequate safeguards, local generation (solar, wind, etc) remains problematic in many places, generation sources are relatively dirty, usage controls are primitive, etc. Most of our infrastructure was built decades ago and (IMO) too little was allocated for ongoing upgrades nor were the increases in demand adequately planned for.
The grid works but it's not nearly as robust, efficient or clean as it could be. That's the problem.
I have no idea if this is true, but I've always liked this story that's been going around the 'net for years...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I took the trans mongolian railway from Moscow to Beijing about 10 years ago. One memorable experience is that near the border between Russia and Mongolia (or Mongolia and China i forget) they will change the bogie's on the entire train because the gauges differ in russia and china. The entire trainset is lifted up; the bogies moved out and new ones put in place. A very memorable experience.
naah sig schmig
Wooshed! by he who himself was wooshed.
Also, for those who can't tell, I inverted the "o"s in woosh for added effect.
Since when did voltage kill?
Standard rail gauge is already an anachronism. In the future, it will be more ridiculous still.
As peak oil is passed, our society will once again rely more and more on railroads for heavy transportation. Even today, railroad companies are introducing larger freight cars in an attempt to increase capacity, but the only realistic way to meet future needs is to increase rail gauge. What was appropriate for the nineteenth century just will not apply for the twenty-first, twenty-second, and beyond.
People of the future will lament that an increase in gauge was not planned much earlier. Having to redesign and rebuild a national rail infrastructure is no mean feat. We need to get moving now.
Standards area a good thing. So, how about the metric system America?
Since it started driving higher currents through the same resistance (in this case the human body)
It's very difficult to design your outlets to limit the current that will go through a human without limiting what will go through an electronic device, however lower voltages have less ability to overcome the same resistance to cause large amounts of current to flow through the heart (which is usually the important bit in the "killing" part)
110v can kill you, so can 5v, or 3000v. But if I had to choose, I'd much rather trust the natural resistance of my skin to adequately limit the current flow from a 5v, or even 110v system than a 3000v one, or even a 240v one.
On a somewhat related note, I know someone who moved from Britain to Canada many years ago, his primary reason to do so was because we use 110 instead of 240. He worked as an electronics repair person (mainly TVs) and was sick of taking 240v shocks. Personally I've always described it as "110 tickles, 240 doesn't!"
And here I thought this might be about Feynman's work on quantum electrodynamics.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Today it would cost billions, and take years to do this. Just how far has the US come in flexible able engineering? It has gone backwards.
A safety switch will protect you from large currents - they are designed to shut off the supply as soon as there is a difference between active and neutral current, or if there is a leak to ground.
I have been stung by 240v a couple of times too, when I was younger. I haven't had a hit in years, now I treat it with much more respect and caution. Also if your friend is careless enough to get get bitten by 240v and 110v, , it's just as well TV's don't need fly-back circuits any more or he'd be getting bitten by the several thousand volts from those circuits.
...they remained on track to complete the change on time, and the project didn't go off the rails.
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
...the link in the article now points to a blank page. Try this instead: http://southern.railfan.net/ties/1966/66-8.ZZZ/gauge.html
A single gauge track network makes the most sense, but where you have multiple gauge networks, why not make the trucks adjustable? It sounds like a problem that even 19th century engineering could have solved.
The US has a freight rail system that is the envy of Europe. (Europe is ahead in passenger rail, but that loses money.) Intermodal traffic (containers) is way up over the last decade, and profitable. There's new rail construction going on, and rails and locomotives have been upgraded in recent years.
Modern large locomotives use what are essentially giant computer-controlled servomotors to drive the wheels, so that all the wheels on all the locomotives stay in sync and share the load equally, which means they can all be torqued up to just below where they start to slip. This means fewer locomotives per train, little or no wheel slip, and the ability to coordinate many locomotives spread throughout a train.
Last year, Union Pacific ran a train 3.5 miles long from Los Angeles to Denver. Average freight train length in the US is now 6500 feet and climbing. That replaces a lot of trucks. Since Los Angeles built a no-grade-crossing rail connection to the port there, far fewer trucks are moving to the port.
Europe still has a lot of little 2-axle freight cars. Those disappeared from US trackage some time before World War Two, replaced by the standard big four-axle cars still used today. The bigger cars are also stronger, with a consistent minimum coupler strength, which means longer trains are possible.
Mixing high speed passenger trains and freight on the same track cuts severely into freight capacity. Each passenger train uses up the track time of six freights.
If changing all the rail systems could be done so quickly, converting to metric should be a snap.
Just need to do a little more prep and then we'll start. Any day now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_gauge
It's 4 ft 8 1/2 in.
********************
I object to Intellect without Discipline.
A safety switch will protect you from large currents - they are designed to shut off the supply as soon as there is a difference between active and neutral current, or if there is a leak to ground.
Which does absolutely nothing if you aren't grounded. if the current is passing through you from one prong of the plug to the other there is no way for the circuit to know the difference between you and a toaster. And simply limiting the amount of current won't help either because it only takes about 60mA to kill you if it flows through the right places. (and most of the things you legitimately want current to flow through require a lot more than that)
Although ground fault breakers are big safety improvements, they just can't protect you if you're contacting both wires, and not ground.
Science marches forward, nowadays several variable gauge systems have been invented. Two types are in use in Spain, where I did my MBA.
check this:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Variable_gauge_axles
So yes, the gauge change had to be done in the 19th century, but nowadays is less of a necesity.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Well the singer, he had long hair,
And the drummer, he knew restraint.
And the bass man, he had all the right moves,
And the guitar player was no saint.
So let's go way back to the ancient times
When there were no fifty states.
And on a hill, there stands Sherman,
Sherman and his mates...
And they're marchin' through Georgia!
They're marchin' through Georgia!
They're marchin' through Georgia!
G-G-G-G-G-Georgia!
They're marchin' through Georgia!
They're marchin' through Georgia!
Marchin' through Georgia!
G-G-G-G-G-Georgia!
And there stands R.E.M.
The Admin and the Engineer
And it always will.
That's the nice thing about cars on roads, no need to worry so much about exact wheel placement. If only they rolled as efficiently. Maybe roads should be smooth as glass and cars should have roller bearings for wheels. Bumper cars. Would be like blood cells sloshing through veins - calling roads arteries couldn't be more apt. Just a few little engineering hurdles to overcome, nothing major...
If the American south could convert to standard US gauge in only two days, why us is it taking the rest of the world so long to convert to US standard measurements? It can't be that hard to ditch the 4 syllable metric system for the more efficent 1 to 2 syllable Imperial system.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
"Over two days [...] the railroad network in the southern United States was converted [to] standard gauge"
Compare and contrast: 2 days to convert 11,500 miles of railways to narrower gauge vs. PSN downtime.
Of course I know Visa's probably reaming Sony for PCI concerns right now, but I'm still going to sit back with this delicious popcorn and enjoy the show.
"4.71 inches otta be enough for anyone."
Table-ized A.I.
One of the Colin Kapp "unorthodox Engineers" stories had a planet where no two railway lines used the same gauge.
'The Railways Up On Cannis' or maybe 'The Subways Of Tazoo'.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
that should actually be easier to accomplish and would benefit more people.
the US government was not building rail lines. The majority of rail lines built in the 180s were done by private businesses, many without any grants or federal assistance. As such we have an abundance of rail still to this day for moving freight. As society improved roads became dominant because people valued their freedom, freedom to travel and where to live, all within their means.
I don't understand why so many bemoan out passenger train service. There are only two profitable lines in the world and all the rest require subsidy because the expected number of riders never materialized. There is also the problem in the US of population density, or lack thereof across much of the country. I remember many years ago (think early 90s) having friends over from France who asked if I could pick them up at the airport. They flew into NY, I live in Atlanta. They asked about a short train ride and I explained to them how long it would take. Naturally they flew to Atlanta from NY. We then lent them our van and they toured the US. What was supposed to be two weeks for them turned into six.
It is all about scale. Railroads do what they do best here, move freight. We then top that off with a large number of trucks because as a people we value convenience. That means not having just a few stores with items we want but many stores. It really is phenomenal how convenient we have it. Bring friends over from the Poland and Czech and they were amazed not at our grocery stores (they actually have a couple of good ones) but the sheer number of them. Just driving back from the airport to my house (twenty miles) we passed more of them than they knew of in their own home areas. Not one of them even mentioned travel by train btw, apparently they are quite used to travel by car. Even going so far as to tell me, never drive through Poland with a car that has German plates.
We don't have a need for widespread high speed rail. We don't have the population density to support it. Even Europe doesn't have it in many areas even served by rail. It takes a lot of extra money to keep it all operating. Regardless of what some think, travel by train ain't fast, no matter the speed of the train. Airports even with our boneheaded security will get you farther faster. I can engineer a few "what about X to Y" but it still doesn't make it right.
I love this one fact, the US moves nearly fives times as much by rail as Europe does. This is measured as how much freight is moved by train. Now tell me who has the problem?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
There are costs of trans-shipping between gauges, etc ; but it's not a totally one-way calculation. You do need to evaluate the alternatives.
Yes, reducing the number of gauges in use would have benefits for rolling stock manufacturers, but they're only modest benefits since equipment is built in batches on short production lines. Again, there's a calculation involved in the bidding. And there is an external relevant standard for new systems : the shipping container. If you can get standard shipping containers along your line, then the drive to upgrade/ completely rebuild would be lower.
Which standard to choose ... probably varies from one continent to another. Though the cited Australian morass illustrates the problem well.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
So, since the distance between rails was determined by the size of a horse's ass, does that mean the Southern horses were better fed?
http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp
Seriously though, the snopes writeup notes that the South used not just five-foot gauge but a total of three different ones, and that that inconsistency was one of the factors that decided the Civil War.
I'm pretty sure it would be illegal to build a house that only had 50A service, and has been for some time. (You'd never pass electrical inspection.) Current code calls for at least 100A 220V split-phase, and most will have 150A and up. I think even my grandmother's house (built in '45) has better than 50A service. Likewise with the non-polarized and/or ungrounded sockets. (Again, not code-compliant for a very long time.) And rolling blackouts are quite rare; they are largely confined to California during only the most extreme heat waves. They aren't "yearly."
Ok, you can't run a 3kW power tool in your kitchen. That's hardly "dismal." (And getting a split-phase outlet installed for that purpose is a cheap job that can be done by any electrician.)
Just a question. Would 5 foot and a half as mentioned really be 1.5 meters as a width?
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
The busses stop every block or two at worst. Nearly everything you'd want to go to is on the El and frequently it's much faster than traveling via car. Having to park a car on the city streets, however, is the total opposite of freedom. Between street cleaning tickets, break-ins, stray balls from kids, bad drivers taking out your mirrors, and other headaches on top of what you'd have in suburban car ownership, it takes a hell of a lot of time and money to deal with.
But if they hand gone metric at
the same time we would not have
missed that space shot to the Mars.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
That depends where you live. Around here the power is rarely out for more than a moment, and even those times are infrequent.
Power in general is quite reliable in most of the US in the sense that power outages are infrequent and normally short - rarely more than a few hours a year most places absent a major natural disaster. Nevertheless, I am not aware of any location in the US that is not subject to periodic power outages and (primarily due to cost) much of the infrastructure is not installed in the most reliable methods possible. I've had two power outages of several hours duration (due to storms) in the last 9 months and at least a dozen short power interruptions of a few seconds. Those could have been avoided with buried cables but buried cables are expensive so the more vulnerable above ground system is used. It's a tradeoff but it's unclear if the cost/benefit ratio is optimized.
My point isn't that the power in the US is bad - it's actually amazingly good. Rather, my point is that the power system in the US isn't nearly as good as it could be. Our currently available technology significantly exceeds the capability of the vast majority of our electrical grid. Remote monitoring equipment is only fairly recently getting rolled out. My place now is the first place I've lived where I don't have sometime come out to read the meter. The sophistication of the equipment in most houses, businesses as well as at the utilities to monitor and adjust usage is positively archaic and only very slowly improving.
Actually I think there will be some interesting improvements coming down the road if plug-in hybrid autos catch on like I think they will. Some improvements will come very naturally as power companies try to keep costs in line. Other improvements will probably require a bit of prodding by our government and by consumers to take place, such as emissions regulation. Power companies don't make money by getting you to consume less energy so they have a built in disincentive to make certain types of efficiency improvements.
I'm 35, German and can't recall a power outage because I never experienced one.
I don't know much about the German grid but a few facts come to mind.
Perhaps you have never experienced a power outage (I'm dubious of your claim but perhaps it is true) but if you are going to compare the US grid to the German grid, you need to understand the differences in what the engineers on this side of the pond face.
who perhaps don't know, given the sad state of education in the u.s., that all of europe was rebuilt about 60 years ago under the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
This Uniqugauge project in India is more than a decade old. Majority of the metre guage (exactly 1 metre wide) have now been converted to borad-guage (5 feet 6 inches). This has tremendously improved connectivity to both passengers and frieght across the country. There are no bogie changing or wheelset adjusting mechanisms in use anywhere here. The broadguage trains run much smoother and faster than the metre guage ones. The narrow guage tracks are mostly in use on the mountains. Only a handful narrow guage tracks on the plains are being converted to broadguage. Typically it takes 3-5 years for the convertsion to complete and for that duration no trains will run on that section. Quiet absurd really, blocking travel for years.