I was going to post this on the Rio Grande thread, but I didn’t want to interfere or side track such a good discussion–easily one of the best we have had on here in years.
Anyway, there was in interesting side bar on the viability of narrow gauge railroads.
When I see something that strikes me as illogical regarding railroads, I try to keep my mouth shut, as it usually involves a completely logical reason that is simply beyond my amaturish knowledge.
However, I have always wondered what they were thinking when they built the Clover Leaf as a narrow gauge railroad. After reading some of the reasons you do and do not build narrow gauage railroads, I feel all the more strongly that it simply did not make sense to build the Clover Leaf as a narrow guage line. None of the positive factors seemed to be there (with the possible exception of cheaper start up) and all of the negative factors seem to be there.
You need to go back and look at the "Cheap Transportation Movement " of the 1870’s and the National Narrow Gauge Convention of July 18, 1878 in Cincinnati. Take a gander at George Hilton’s book in general and Corny Hauck’s “Ohio Narrow Gauge” for the Clover Leaf in particular.
(And don’t ever fall into lockstep with those silly-*ssed beanconters)
I live within sight of the Cloverleaf Main and in the vague recesses of my brain I seem to recall there was a “pie-in-the-sky” plan to create a narrow gage network. It might have been Gould and it was something like spanning from the East Broad Top to the D&RG. This route was going to be a key route in that link-up. Things didn’t pan out and the other routes never got built or if they did, as standard gage. One noteworthy accomplishment of the Cloverleaf: it was the longest conversion to standard gage in one day.
Included Clover Leaf, Ohio Northern, SSW, Kansas Central and D&RG…for a brief while you could go Toledo-Houston via narrow gauge with a boat crossing thew Mississippi.
I couldn’t find Ohio Narrow Gauge on Amazo. Did you mean Narrow Gauge in Ohio by John W. Hauck? I have read that book and it does give you a lot of insight into the “narrow gauge fever” that swept the midwest in the last 19th century.
You are correct, sir. My granddad and uncle both worked for the Clover Leaf at the time (a.k.a. the “Toledo, St. Louis & Western”). My granddad worked for the Lake Erie & Western prior to that (a.k.a. the “Leave Early & Walk”). I heard the story of the 1-day conversion from my uncle. To have so many workers positioned all along the route and have it all coordinated and done in 24 hrs without cellphones or even radios was an astounding feat.
If they converted it over to standard gauge in one day, it wpuld seem they would have had to use the same ties, rails and roadbed(?). If that’s true, was buying smaller equipment the only money-savings realized in the whole deal?
I don’t know the exact history of this gage change offhand. But I have heard of other similar changes on other lines. What they did was move one rail outward. I assume this was preceded by several days, months, or even years of tie replacement to standard gage ties in anticipation of an eventual gage change. And I also assume that if all ties were not standard gage, they could still have moved the rail and re-spiked it to a new position near the end of each narrow gage tie. Then as quickly as possible, they could switch out the narrow gage ties and replace them with standard gage ties without delaying train operations. But the gage change itself, of course, had to happen fast because to run trains, the line had to be either one gage or the other.
In the long run there was no money saved at all – just money wasted.
But I think your question pertains to what was reusable. The embankment was reusable, but it would have required widening fairly quickly to obtain adequate bearing area under the ties plus a toe path. For a short time it would have been OK provided speeds were slow and soft spots were watched carefully. The ties as you point out would have been too short, but that’s not as big a deal as I think you think, as this occurred 60 years before treated ties came into widespread use. The lifetime of a tie in that era was maybe 5 years, so it’s not like a lot of value was thrown away. As for the rail, it was probably wrought iron and light, with a very short lifespan, and railways were rapidly increasing size of rail as the metallurgy and mill capabilities were evolving rapidly, so no great loss there either. The equipment, though – now that was junk. But probably there wasn’t much of it, and it had a lifetime you could almost measure in months, too.
The big value thrown away was opportunity. By building narrow-gauge it delayed the development of the territory, provided incentive for standard-gauge competitors to extend invasive fingers into traffic-generating points of consequence that remained in place after the standard-gauge conversion forever sapping its local traffic, discouraged shippers from making large investments on its lines, discouraged friendly connections from working with it to develop through traffic patterns, confused its investors with its changing strategies, and encouraged the best managers and line employees to move on to other roads w
There is a lengthy and detailed chapter on the Clover Leaf - and others on several other roads in the vicinity - in The Nickel Plate Road by John A. Rehor (Kalmbach Publishing Co., circa 1964, prob. out of print now). I don’t have a good grasp of that material as compared to RWM’s analysis (above), but I believe you’d find it of interest.
Further on my previous post on this (immediately above):
The correct title of the book is The Nickel Plate Story; copyright 1965 (not 1964) by John A Rehor; Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 65-27730 (no ISBN or other similar numbers that I can find).
As to Gabe’s questions - it seems that he’s pretty much right, it was illogical ! (see esp. pg. 120, below). If I understand it correctly, it originated with the businessmen of Delphos, esp. a druggist, one Joseph W. Hunt. Also, the context was that Ohio - esp. Cincinnati - seemed to be a hot-bed of 3-ft. gauge construction at the time, led only by Colorado - the Painesville & Youngstown apparently started 3-ft. operations in 1871, the same year as the D&RG started in Colorado. And in a bizarre “man-bites-dog” twist, these guys even planned to acquire the then-standard gauge 25-mile long Frankfort & Kokomo Railroad and convert it to 3-ft. gauge as part of their scheme to assemble an extension to the Mississippi River ! (pgs. 123 -125, below)
Rehor’s detailed discussion of the narrow-gauge aspects of the Clover Leaf starts with the chapter on The Little Giant = the Toledo, Cincinnati & St. Louis, the Clover Leaf’s predecessor (pages 118 - 141), and continues in the following chapter on The Clover Leaf (pages 142 - 170), though it ends at about page 150 after recounting the big gauge-change on Sunday, June 26, 1887.
There’s a lot more detail that this, and many portions echo what Railway Man has to say above - i*.e.*, “that splendid narrow-gauge house of cards” (the TC&StL, pg. 119), the "absurd notion that a narrow-gauge trunk system could successfully compete with establis
It seems somewhat logical, that DRG would see the benefit of building narrow gauge, based on the traffic and the terrain. But why did Ohio, and especailly Cincinnati become a hot bed of narrow gauge construction?
I saw that. I’m just wondering why Ohio/Cincinatti for the movement? Why not Indianapolis, or Memphis, or wherever? Was there something specific about that area that made narrow guage more of a popular idea?
Murph, the grades out of the Ohio River Valley were steep enough to give standard gage equipment troubles, so they thought narrow gage was the solution.
One other thing to think about on the conversion from narrow to standard gage. Wouldn’t it have been easier to install the third rail ahead of time and then on the big day change the wheel-sets on their cars and locomotives. Otherwise they would have plenty of track and nothing to run unless they borrowed rolling stock until they could convert or buy standard gage equipment.
It wasn’t random happenstance. This area was off-route for the trunk lines building toward Chicago and business leaders feared if they didn’t get railway service right away, they would forever be an economic backwater. The trunk lines were so close they could almost see them, but so far away they were of no instant value. Nor were these people who were living way out on the frontier where they could easily reconcile themselves to railways not arriving for a decade or more, Capital was extremely scarce in the U.S. and a solution that promised to deliver a railroad at lower cost was irresistible. That made them easy prey for the ideologues in search of an enraptured audience and the promoters sniffing for suckers. As it turned out this was a bit of an economic backwater, and for rational geographic reasons.
I do not think the grades were any engineering reason to have chosen narrow-gauge, though that might have been said by someone. If so, I don’t think they were either familiar with railway engineering or were fishing for plausible explanations.
Many railways did convert gauge on at least part of their lines by the method you describe. But it was not a solution available to all railways as it required the railway to at least temporarily have one-half again as much rail in inventory as they actually needed to operate the physical plant. In that era rail was the single most expensive component of a railway – the price of rail per ton fell by more than half between the Civil War and 1900 simultaneous with revolutionary improvements in quality due to advances in metallurgy and manufacturing technology – and the cost of rail could easily be more than 1/2 the total investment in building and equipping a line. For a impecunious narrow-gauge built to avoid high costs in the first place, purchasing 50% extra rail was simply impossible, and borrowing it was out of the question as it was not available to loan. Most of the lines that converted gauges by the third-rail method were components of a much larger system and converted at a much later date when there was large stocks of old, light rail cascaded into inventory, that could then affort to loan th
Rehor’s book says that for part of the Clover Leaf changeover - after the longer ties were installed ahead of time - additional spikes were already set in the ties at the proper location for the wider gauge (the “field side” / outside of the rail only, no doubt, and probably before or without tie plates, too). That way, once the spikes were pulled from the rail to be moved, all they had to do was “bar over” / slide that rail out to those spikes, and then set and drive the “gage side” (inside) spikes. This pre-set would have reduced that task of the mission by about half, which of course would be significant and worthwhile under those time constraints. Better yet, it was all work that had to be done anyway, and could be done in advance as time and track availability and other circumstances permitted - not a “premium time” operation as the gauge change itself had to be.
If the rail was so expensive that they couldn’t afford to carry 50% extra on the books, how did they handle the rolling stock? Did they have 100% extra wheel sets laying around or did by buy all new (or used) equipment that was waiting at various interchange points? It seems at first glance that track might be cheaper than all new cars and locomotives. Track is only half of the equation on change of gage. Were cars and locomotives that much cheaper?