I recently came across a Wikipedia article about “gauntlet” tracks.
I was a bit surprised by the term because I remember John Armstrong wrote about these in Track Planning for Realistic Operation and I remembered him using the term “gantlet”. I just came across my copy of the book and it confirmed that my memory is correct.
Knowing that Wikipedia doesn’t always vet their information, I tend to give more credibility to John Armstrong. My question is which is correct or are both acceptable?
In medieval times, a gauntlet was a leather glove with chainmail on the back. Hence the term throwing down the gauntlet as a form of challenge.
Mr Armstrong was correct,
From Grammarist.com :
"Gantlet was the original spelling of the word referring to a form of punishment in which people armed with sticks or other weapons arrange themselves in two lines and beat a person forced to run between them*.* It came from the earlier English word gantlope, which in turn comes from the Swedish gatlopp.1 Gauntlet is an alternative spelling of gantlet
on the railroad - the fewest letters usually wins.
The Chicago, South Shore & South Bend Railroad (CSS&SS) is well known for its gantlet bridge where a fatal accident occurred in 1993. If you Google accounts of this accident, you will find the track arrangement referred to both ways - - gantlet and gauntlet. It is commonly referred to in railroaders’ language as “gantlet”.
Rich
According to my trusty “Random House Dictionary of the English Language” (copyright 1968) Definition 1 for “gantlet” is the railroad track construction; they even have a good graphic showing a gantlet track. Definition 2 of “gantlet” is an alternate spelling of “gauntlet” for the punishment.
Kurt Hayek
If anyone’s interested in seeing a real-life gantlet track here’s two of them at the Townley Station on NJ Transit’s Raritan Valley Line. The first one appears at 1:25, the second at 5:35.
Another vareity, the gantlet switch:
Thomas Underwood Coll B&O274 by John W. Barriger III National Railroad Library, on Flickr
The Erie Railroad main line negotiated a ganutlet in downtown Warren, Ohio for many years. That must have been an operating headache:
Erie_Warren_Gauntlet by Edmund, on Flickr
Howard Street Tunnels in Baltimore:
Thomas Underwood Coll B&O105 by John W. Barriger III National Railroad Library, on Flickr
Regards, Ed
Another use was scale track. They didn’t want heavy locomotives on the scale track.
Gantlet or gauntlet, any way you say it was more common than you think.
Pete.
Part of this is the early-20th-Century spelling simplification that led to ‘gage’ in technical terminology (as in ‘loading gage’).
There’s a gantlet switch at the entrance to the Fairbanks Morse plant in Beloit, WI.
Coincidently, this is the July photo on my 2023 B&O calendar.
Note the smashboard above the gantlet track.
At least in my accent, there is a slight pronounciation difference. The “gant” in “gantlet” would rhyme with “can’t”, where in “gauntlet” the “guan” would sound like “gone”.
Not to throw down the gauntlet…
It’s gantlet. Anything posted on Wikipedia should be conmfirmed by other sources
I visited several dictionary sites and they all state that gantlet and gauntlet are variants of each other.
I’ve seen both terms used interchangeably on various sites and references. It’s not worth splitting hairs over.
I like to collect old model railroad “how to” books, some going back to the 1930s. It’s interesting that in the early days of the hobby “gage” seemed to be the most used, like “O gage layout”. Not sure when “gauge” became virtually universal; just sometime after WW2.
I always thought it was gauntlet. Never heard of gantlet. Doesnt even sound right. Im still working on that ‘plough’ word from a year ago [(-D].
PMR
i have always referred to it as a ‘gauntlet’, i have never heard of it being called a gantlet ???
Is that to knock the roof top surfers off? There have been a couple teen deaths in NY and a mother is demanding they do something to prevent teens from getting out the doors and climbing onto the roofs of cars. I don’t think those kids were going to be the next Steve Jobs.
That tunnel is slated to be made higher to accomodate double stacks, as it was built 128 years ago. The gauntlet must start in the tunnel.