A WIDE GAUGE RAILROAD for EFFICIENT PIGGYBACK
by; Charles Weber
A wide gauge railroad would make piggyback trucking much more efficient and would have economies of scale for bulk cargo.
I would like to propose a railroad system which would have such low charges that a cross country freight line would make the Panama Canal obsolescent. It involves the concept of wide gauge rails. The present system uses a rail gauge which tied right in with the wooden axles of Louis the XIVth stagecoaches. With modern metals, equipment is possible with spans of a hundred feet or more. Back in the days when capital (especially steel) was hard to come by, when track had to thread through and around valleys and mountains, engines were small, and railroads had to go through towns, narrow gauge rails were logical, in fact essential.
Now, we have massive freight tonnages, low cost Bessemer steel, huge earth moving machines for leveling right-of-ways, and fleets of supporting trucks. It seems strange to me to make railroads using such machines while the railroads themselves wander around the country using Toonerville trolleys.
A railroad with, say a 47 foot wide track, would be able to field cars with up to 1,000 times the capacity of the existing boxcars for low density loads (like furniture). This would represent a substantial escalation toward the cube of the gauge ratios for low-density cargo. This would represent a labor cost between 0.1% and 1% of existing costs for such cargo. The fuel costs would be considerably reduced also. Air resistance should increase about proportional to the gauge for long trains while the capacity for most cargo should rise about proportional to the square, or even better, of the gauge for that same air resistance. Bearing frictional losses and maintenance cost differentials are more difficult to predict, but there should be considerable advantage. While it is true that inertial losses from starting and
Why even dream of building an impossibly huge system to move ships over dry land when the same goal is being accomplished by stack trains over the existing railroads?
Financing would be difficult at best and right-of-way acquisition would be pretty close to impossible. Environmental impact would hardly be minimal, especially where the line would cross the Rockies.
I’m not an expert, but I would think that any cost savings over shipping by boat would be so minimal as to make the huge initial expenditure not worth it. Think of the cost of a single locomotive that was made to run on 47 foot wide rails, and the engine(s) it would need to move such heavy loads. While this plan might be nice to dream about, it probably isn’t feasible, and you definately will never see it.
Why make a train wider for furniture and commodities? When you could make trains infanately longer and heavier with modern materials and technoloigy at a much lower cost. Piggybacking ships sounds very inefficient.
47 foot gauge would make a huge frontal area and would increase wind resistance and therefore not have any fuel savings.
A number of years ago there was an article in Trains Magazine proposing very wide gauge trains. The proposal was to modify existing double track lines and laying new double track lines so that the outside rails on each track could be used to operate wide gauge cars and locos. Standard gauge trains could still be run on each track. The illistrations also showed standard gauge locos pulling wide gauge cars, and standard and wide cars in the same train.
[:)]The article is “The Case For the Double-Track Train” March 1976 Trains page 28.
Since I read it once, I must have that issue somewhere, but its not where it belongs in my collerction[:(] I think the proposed gauge was about 20’
On a narrower note there was “Hitler’s Super Railway” August 1984 Trains page 38
A track gauge of up to 4 meters (approx 13’) was discussed for this proposal.
…I subscribe to the side: It is good to have some thinking outside the box on all kinds of situations. This situation though sounds like an impossibility. Large ships loaded onto rail vehicles of a sort with GvW so large I doubt if that much load could be hauled over grades encountered. And some grades would be necessary…as we know there are ranges of mountains in the west and of course the eastern ranges as well. Just not feasible. And of curse other concerns some of which are listed above in previous posts.
This thread got me thinking about a thread that popped up here a few months ago, wasn’t there a “fantastic” sitcom at one point about a passenger train that ran on a very wide gauge, the name escapes me at the moment…
John L. Stephenson, a NY lawyer and quondam RR promoter (also an
antiquarian, traveller, and travel writer) promoted a double-track RR
across the Isthmus of Panama for steamships in the 1850s. Can you imagine
hauling the USS Eisenhower from ocean to ocean by rail? And made out of what?