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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."
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 Our electric grid is primitive and outdated and our fastest passenger trains like the Acela high speed rail on the East Coast are slower than regular trains in other places like Japan (the maximum speed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.
It needs to be done once again when larger areas want to connect. And then continents.
Europe - Asia no problemo
N.A. - Australia this is getting difficult
S.A. - Antarctica now that's ridiculous.
Arguably with intermodal all that really matters is container size, since you'll be switching transport providers every couple thousand miles anyway.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Mosyt of those, there are clear advantage to. easy base conversion and unit creation, unambiguous and lexical-chronological sorting equivalence, more than 4bil addresses respectively
is there some clear advantage to 240v 50hz AC?
Of course, there will always be rouge nations using odd guages.
Houses are already wired for 240v, just not most appliances so not most outlets. Few residential applications use synchronous motors, so the frequency doesn't matter much (beyond higher frequencies allowing smaller transformers). And at least mainland North American countries all use the same plug.
Date format is stupid all around the world. Everyone should just use 2011-05-08 15:00. Yes, drop the stupid am/pm stuff too.
wow that must be one mother of a plug
Well if you're going to do that then you should also drop the 24 hours clock - 24? What's up with that??? The 100 hour/day clock makes much more sense - think of all the overtime we'd get!
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Rouge nations? Would that be the Kingdom of Maybelline, the Covergirl Islands, or the Republique de l'Oreal?
And what's a "guage"? It sounds french. Do you pronounce it "goo-aj", "g-ow-gh", or "joo-a-jee"?
Fire marshal had a heart attack when he saw all the daisy chained power strips.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
There is a slight advantage to having 240v but not much. Cables can be thinner and carry the same amount of power since the amps are lower. But, for the highest power devices in US homes (water heaters, clothes driers, ovens, etc) they are already on 240V. For other appliances there isn't enough advantage to justify switching the entire country and changing billions of dollars of infrastructure. The efficiency advantage is small. 60hz has the advantage as far as frequency goes. 60hz distribution systems are slightly more efficient. 60Hz steam turbines are smaller than their 50hz counterparts, which saves material costs for turbine manufacturers (and the utilities who buy them). There is basically no difference to the end-user. All the advantages/disadvantages are on the utility and distribution side. Again, there is no compelling reason to change the entire US over to 50Hz, and change out billions of dollars of infrastructure.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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?
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.
Well, as long America is a British Empire Colony, no way to explain them the beautiful simplicity of the Metric system.
(Sorry my bad French) Je fais parler les Guignols de l'Info. Le pied, quoi.
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.
Ireland, however, uses 5' 3". Fortunately we are an island, with no rail intercommunication with anywhere else :-)
is there some clear advantage to 240v 50hz AC?
No. Frequency is largely irrelevant. The only common (although probably not so much anymore) residential application I can think of are wall clocks with synchronous motors using the line frequency to keep time. Increasing the voltage would give you more usable power out of your common 15/20A household branch circuit, but that's it. Perhaps you could lower the total number of branch circuits by going to higher voltage, but I don't know how many people would really care that they have 1/3 fewer breakers. Or you have crazy ass things like the UK ring circuit.
Take a look at a lot of your electronics and you'll see that they probably accept a "universal input" of 50/60Hz between 100-240VAC. One distinct advantage higher frequency has is allowing smaller size of components like transformers. This is why you'll see things like 115VAC @ 400Hz in aircraft.
this is my sig
I suspect that one General Sherman's er... enthusiastic removal of southern legacy hardware really helped speed up the transition. He did have a real air of resolve when it came to dealing with insurgents.
Obviously, your education was lacking in firearms training and the study of railroads. You should have put a couple years in the Navy. You would have learned that a riot gun is actually a 12 guage shotgun, and that a 5 inch 54 caliber gun's chamber is 54 inches long, and 5 inches diameter where it necks down into the barrel.
First "g" is hard, the "au" is a long "a" second "g" is soft. End it right there - the "e" is silent. I guess you could sound it out if I were to spell it G-A-J-E.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Date format is stupid all around the world. Everyone should just use 2011-05-08 15:00. Yes, drop the stupid am/pm stuff too.
Try: 1500 08-05-2011
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.
And, how do you pronounce 'savages'?
WINN-dohs YUZ-ers
John
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.
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by seventy-six we'll be A.O.K.
Your forgot Esperanto.
143.5cm. There, all done! Now get cracking on moving all those rails 0.1mm closer.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I was surprised to find that this was standardized in the same Act of Parliament that mandated 4' 8 1/2" in Britain - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Regulation_(Gauge)_Act_1846
To be pedantic, when referring to artillery, and specifically naval artillery, a 5"/54 caliber gun would have a barrel length of 270 inches; as the 54 refers to the number of diameters that the barrel is long, not the chamber length.
No, little-endian makes more sense because it's consistent. In your example, you've got a big-endian super-format, where each of the constituents are little-endian. That's just stupid.
And there's already a standard for dates. ISO 8601. It's basically what the parent described.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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!"
Hey, get China and India to standardise on your units and we'll consider it ourselves.
Thing is we all think standardisation is good. Most of the world uses metric. It's easier for the 5% to change than the 95%.
Because nothing says "awesome" like being named "Kingdom". Until somebody trades you for a horse.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
I think we're forgetting about how the trains into Australia will need to be scanned for any small breasted women who could be seen by pedophiles.
I always thought the best gauge for trains was the standard N-gauge. I still have my Rock Island Golden Rocket in a box down in the basement. My gramps was an engineer for the Rock Island and I rode it from Chicago to the West Coast several times as a kid. What a magnificent train that was. It had a 12-bedroom sleeper car called La Palma and it was like taking a room at the Four Seasons from Union Station to Los Angeles. You'd fall asleep crossing the Mississippi at St Louis, lulled by the gentle motion and wake up in the Rockies.
The coffee in the dining car ("El Comedor") was a special blend. It was served in those silver pots with heavy, short beige and red china that said "Golden Rocket". Delicious roasted potatoes and pork chops. Man, that was one sexy way to travel. Screw Southwest Airlines. If there were still decent passenger trains in the US, I'd never sit in another cramped 737 with a smelly fat-ass on either side of me eating cardboard extruded cookies.
You are welcome on my lawn.
A friend once bought a laser printer in the US (60Hz) and took it to New Zealand (50Hz). The power supply handled the 120v to 240v issue, but the motor that fed the paper through the system couldn't handle the frequency difference so that when he printed, the image on the pages was compressed because the paper moved too slowly.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Sherman did what was necessary to end the war sooner. Tearing up the South's rail net, as these things go, was no atrocity.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
And of course there isn't much rail traffic currently between europe and russia, the rail stock uses different gauges.
Not exactly. In fact the rolling stock exchanges the wheels at the borders. The whole waggon gets liftet from the bogies, the bogies are rolled away, new bogies of the right gauge are rolled in, and the waggon gets eased down on the new bogies.
The TALGO train which is used between Spain and France has adjustable wheels to adapt to the different gauges.
Eh, those were just illegal enemy combatants, hardly to be afforded the protections of the Geneva convention that hadn't been written yet. Whatever was necessary to drag Jefferson Davis out of his spider hole, and all that. 4/11/61! Never Forget!
...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
Most of the energy losses at ~200 mph, are aerodynamic, not friction. Rail does not help there.
Even here Rail helps. If you have a 1600 passenger train half full, you have only one front with air friction per 800 passengers. With cars seated two each you need already 400 fronts where each one creates its own air friction. So even the most aerodynamically perfect cars wont come close to a single train even with no consideration going into air friction.
Some linear power supplies (think transformer, diode bridge, caps) that are designed for 60Hz will fail in ugly ways with 50Hz power. The current capacity of the transformer is reduced, and for power supplies that are already heavily loaded (which is disturbingly common for unregulated supplies) this can push them over the edge. (Not to mention the effects that frequency has on the desired size of filter caps, which might also be insufficient at 50Hz)
Much of the audio gear I have would be unhappy at 50Hz.
The opposite usually works fine, though: Linear supplies designed to operate at 50Hz are generally happy at 60Hz, as the current capacity increases.
On the other hand, most of the current breed of switching supplies don't really care much about input voltage, frequency, or waveform: They're so not picky, these days, you can pretty much feed them anything resembling AC and they'll either produce proper output, or no output.
Kid-proof tablet..
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.
Great, first Truthers, then Birthers, then Deathers and now Sumterers.
50Hz requires more iron in the core of power transformers than 60Hz. Similar effects apply to motors. Now that consumer electronics have switched to high frequency switching supplies, that's not much of an issue for the end user. It does still matter for the transformers used in the power grid to step down from higher distribution voltages to lower domestic voltages.
And by that time trains are obsolete already.
I really rather doubt trains are ever going to be obsolete, barring us figuring out cheap teleportation. There's simply no better method of moving stuff en masse across land.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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.
Ooo can I reply to the troll?
Yep. I sure want to leave Australia and move back to the US. I'm getting so sick of the higher salaries, greater number of holidays, mandated 4-6 weeks of annual leave, the more casual work-to-live culture, cleaner environment, low crime rate, higher life expectancy, affordable healthcare, booming economy, 1-5% unemployment (depending on State), good food, having decent quality TV news and current affairs (ABC/SBS), stronger consumer protection laws, massively lower poverty rate, having more choice in phone and internet services, not getting nudie-scanned or groped at airports, oh the list goes on. I'm just itching to get out of here!
Ok so that's a bit tongue-in-cheek - I'm a dual American and Australian citizen and still spend a lot of time in both countries. No emi/immigration required for me. And there's still stuff that the US has Australia beat at. The highway system there is better than in Australia (which suffers from having a huge area but not a huge population/tax base to fund things from). The cost of living (particularly housing) is less too (though, wages are lower which offsets some of that advantage). The natural environment is also more diverse (don't get me wrong - Australia is beautiful, but it simply doesn't have the diversity of environments and climates that the US/North America does).
But at this point in time I don't think you'd find to many Australians wanting to emigrate to the US. Perhaps the very wealthy, who would like to take advantage of the lower income tax for high earners. But Australia has been incredibly prosperous for the last decade or two - the middle class along with the rich. The financial crisis didn't even scratch it. Not surprisingly, it consistently ranks as one of the top handful of places to be (both in 'economic' and 'quality of life' indices).
Having said that, there is a HUGE number of Australian tourists in the US in the last year or so. This is because it's now incredibly cheap to do so: the AUD is worth more than the USD for the first time in history (thanks to the US Fed printing USD like it's going out of style). The buying power of the AUD in the US is huge at the moment. Combined with generally higher Aussie wages and the already-low prices of goods in the US, it's a shopping bonanza. I have guys at work ask me to get clothes and running shoes and stuff for them when I visit the US because due to the currency movements it's literally less than half the cost. Hell, for big ticket items, it'd be cheaper to fly to the US, buy it, and fly back, than to buy it locally...
Most Australians travel internationally quite regularly. Not just to the US. Not every country is like the US where only a tiny proportion of people have a passport.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia
Try building a bridge that can take an earthquake and then have a planned life span of 150 years.
http://baybridgeinfo.org/projects/sas-tower
Sure, it was cheap, only $77mil.. But you might have been lucky to make $0.50/hour
Adjusting for inflation that's 1.1 billion, and the thing failed in a 7.1 earthquake. Imagine what would have happened if the 9.0 that hit Japan happened in SF.
English speech states the year last, and tends to have the month first.
Interestingly, not in countries which use the DD/MM/YYYY format. In the UK, it is quite uncommon to hear "May the 8th 2011", and far more common to hear "8th of May 2011".
I've often wondered about that in a chicken-and-egg sort of way. Was it the American turn of phrase, with the month first, that led to the US MM/DD/YYYY annotation, or is it the fact that the MM/DD/YYYY annotation is a US standard that has led people to adopt that turn of phrase? And vice versa for the UK?
Ah, yes arrogance. Let me guess - you're from Europe? That's the only part of the world that has the arrogance to insist everyone else should live, act, and think exactly like they do. Woe to the person(s) who don't.
I have to resist the urge to point out all the ways that Americans insist everyone else should live, act and think exactly as they do.
Well, arguably having an incompatible railway network won World War II on the Eastern Front, so, I'm not counting on the Russians changing their system just yet. ;-)
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.
depends how overweight they are
which is totally what she said
Incandescent lightbulbs are far to slow to flicker at that frequency (I can't believe they'd cool more than 10 degrees in the zero passing. It's just way to short) and CFL's have a electronic ballast which requires them to have a high frequency (about 5 KHz I believe). Large scale modern TL arrays (office) usually have an electronic ballast too (and thus are at a high frequency). Old small scale TL's do flicker at 50 Hz and can cause headaches.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
But those are (were, it differs and is changing) on 400V three phase here. As is industrial equipment, bigger motors, welders etc (some of which are not uncommon in home workshops). And you don't have that available. The "European" system is 230/400V, not just 230V.
Actually, 277/480V is quite common in the states for commercial and industrial uses. You can get it in your house too if you are willing to pay for it, but most people are not since there isn't any compelling reason to do so. The monthly service fees for the 480V hookup far exceed the cost of the extra copper that is required for the lower voltage cable.
Keep in mind that electricity in the states is commonly distributed at 14.4kV and 120/240V is just the voltage you get after it has been converted by the step-down "pig pole" transformer on the neighborhood telephone pole. 120/240V is a convenient standard for home users the same way that 277/480 is a convenient standard for commercial and industrial customers. If you need something special and are willing to pay, the electric utility is more than happy to work with you and bill you accordingly.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.