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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 Our electric grid is primitive and outdated and our fastest passenger trains like the Acela high speed rail on the East Coast are slower than regular trains in other places like Japan (the maximum speed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.
Of course, there will always be rouge nations using odd guages.
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"?
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Maybe it's the piss poor domestic voltage (110V P-E) that necessitates using 2 phase supplies for domestic electric heating, the occasional domestic installations rated for 50 amps (5.5kW) and the un-earthed non-polarised plug / sockets? Or maybe it's just the yearly summer rolling blackouts?
Coming from a country where you can run a 3kW power-tool from a single phase domestic plug / socket combo, then when your done quickly boil water in an electric tea kettle to make a nice hot drink, and at the end of the day wash yourself clean in a 10kW electric shower I can say that the US domestic supply at least looks pretty fucking dismal.
110V domestic voltage? Ungrounded, non-polarized plugs? 50A service? Are you referring to North America? If so, you're woefully misinformed, or ignorant, or both. With minor exceptions domestic service is 220V split phase. While most things in American households run on 110V (one half or the other of the 220V split phase) electric appliances like water heaters, stoves, ovens, and clothes dryers, run on 220V. Current building codes require grounded, polarized outlets, and the only place you find ungrounded, unpolarized outlets are old buildings that haven't been upgraded. Most new construction gets 200A service, and like the outlets, the only place you find mere 50A or 100A service is in older homes that haven't upgraded their service.
And I shower with water, not electricity. ;-)
Translation:
Oh my god, I can't stand ANYTHING about my country not being the best out of all the countries ever; I'd better come up with some excuse to get defensive and turn it into a bad thing about the other countries so mine is best again!
Yes, there are reasons Europe's grid is better. That doesn't mean it's not...better. The GP was arguing that it wasn't better.
Seriously, not everything is about your smug sense of nationalistic superiority. You didn't design the fucking grid; what's it to you anyway if somebody says it's bad? Fix it, or accept that it's bad but you're going to focus on other things. Don't pretend that it's a good thing because Hitler. Or some damn thing.
Because nothing says "awesome" like being named "Kingdom". Until somebody trades you for a horse.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I think it is clear from what I wrote that, had we had the fortune to deploy our power grid from scratch commencing 1945
Europe had to rebuild much of it's infrastructure in the 20th century, in some areas twice, which cost's a lot of money and time, and still we managed.
What's your excuse for not getting your system up to date?
You didn't have the same drawbacks that we did.
GP is right: You are one of those people that take any factual statement as a personal insult and lash out.
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. ;-)
You'll notice I wrote 110v(P-E) as in phase to earth, the hilarious American "split-phase" system is merely a testimony to how poor your domestic supply.
It's hard to jingoism your way around facts, but you still made a good go of it.
It is true that in the US we use the three wire Edison system and that it does have 110v to earth while in much of Europe they use straight 220v with one side earthed. But exactly how the transformer secondary is earthed does not change the amount of available power. The Edison system simply makes it possible to easily have both 220v and 110v in the same building.
Your statement that the US system "necessitates the use of 2-phase supplies for domestic heating" is true, but I do not see how this is a disadvantage. All you are saying is that one must connect the two supply conductors of a large electric heater to the proper terminals in the service panel so that it will receive 220v. So what?
(Aside to US electricians: I know that in your trade split 110v/220v supply is considered single phase. The poster is calling it two-phase because the two hot wires are 180 degrees out of phase. If we were to use strictly consistent terminology, the very old 110 volt only service has a single phase 110 volts from neutral, almost all houses now have two phases 180 degrees apart at 110 volts from neutral, and many office buildings have three phases 120 degrees apart, often at 110 volts with respect to neutral.)
As other posters have pointed out, you are wrong about water heaters. Only the very smallest are ever connected to a 110 volt supply. You are correct in your statements about electric tea kettles and power tools. Since almost all outlets in the typical American home are wired between one of the phases and the neutral, they can only deliver about 1500 watts.
I suspect that the justification for the Edison system is that 110 volts is less dangerous than 220 volts. This system provides a (supposedly) safer 110 volts for most plug-connected devices while still making 220 volts available for those things that need it.
In other words, your complaint is not with the US electrical distribution network, but with the fact that 110 volt outlets predominate in the US home.
I believe the biggest disadvantages of the US system are that it requires wires twice as thick and that many appliances (such as air conditioners) that should be running on 220 volts run on 110 volts because the manufactures know that few users would buy them if they had to install a 220 volt outlet in order to use them.
Finally, yes, there are 50 amp 220 volt/110 volt service panels still out there. At least in New England they are now very rare. 60 amp was standard in the 1960's and nothing less than 100 amp is installed today.