Blue Streak - a few observations on your observations:
B. The technology of the day (latter 1800’s) was probably more limiting with regard to possible loads than anything else. Capacity and capablility grew together at 1435mm, and would have at 6’.
E. The two track bridge at Hancock, NY on the old Erie is pretty robust. That said, I’m not sure if there are any weight restrictions on it. Starrucca Viaduct was also built for two 6’ guage tracks.
F. The curve at Hancock is trying even for today’s trains. The rest of the curves along the line are pretty broad, though.
G. Boring machines are relatively new in RR terms. Early tunnels could easily have been drilled to handle the wider guage without undue height, unless called for by the local geology.
H. Adding 18" to the ties probably wouldn’t cause significant problems. If it would, switches would be an issue even today. (Or are they?)
They would use standard gage to buy off-the-shelf everything, and would be able to resell everything after they were done. Investors generally are not interested in experimenting with new systems.
Not mentioned (yet) were the state legislation prior to Lincoln setting the US Standard at 4’-8 1/2". The usual explanation is that states between 1840 and 1861 set the gage to keep rolling stock from rolling too far into an adjoining state to be spending it’s useful life away from home (and incidentally losing all that tax revenue in the days before when ICC levelled the playying field) - per Hilton & others.
Narrow gauge was the false idea of bringing the cost per mile down to construct railroad lines. The geometry issue cropped-up later as another cop-out. (bridges still failed and shoddy construction plagued narrow gauge lines far worse than their standard gauge counterparts.
Did states levy taxes on rolling stock before or after Lincoln was elected? I know that Illinois levied a tax on the Illinois Central’s revenues but I never heard of a tax on freight cars.
OH, IN, IL,PA all levied for car miles from the mid-1840’s on. Ton miles did not come along largely until after the civil war when better scales became commonplace.
Take the railcar out of state and it might not come back.(the logic of changing the gage up to 2 inches which was all that was needed for wheels to fall-in or get caught in frogs and guardrails/climb.
To the question of why they did not do engineering related to the choice of gage. They did profoundly explore every conceivable engineering question pertaining to the tradeoffs between the use of one gage versus another, but they disagreed on what the engineering told them. They particularly concentrated this analysis on the choice between 3-foot-gage and standard gage. It led to a national debate known as the gage wars or narrow gage fever.
One thing that not everybody understands is that narrow gage was not just confined to the recent-memory systems of the western states where it was used for mountainous terrain. That is just the left over legacy of a much wider national application which had narrow gage systems in almost every state.
The proponents of narrow gage argued that standard gage was a waste of money because it was overbuilt for the task. There were many cases where this was true, and the narrow gage would have been viable, if not optimum. But the more common choice of standard gage made interchange impossible for the narrow gages
I’ve heard of Ohio gauge but I didn’t know it was for tax purposes. I thought it was the railroads themselves that didn’t want to interchange cars for fear of losing their own rolling stock.
The mighty Pennsylvania RR system was 4’9" until march of 1893. I read somewhere that the Strasburg was still listed as that guage in the 1950’s. Must have been a real pain changing it over.
Yes it did. But New York State did not want other roads to connect with the Eire for tax purposes. They wanted it to prevent the Erie from competing with the Erie Canal which the state owned.
I was thinking of those long, skinny things that ply the European river/canal systems. Lake Erie on a windy day looks like the North Atlantic, and those Eurocanallers are NOT designed to deal with waves.
And then there are the canal boats that once plied the, ‘Main line of public works’ in Pennsylvania - separated into sections, loaded on flanged-wheel cradles, towed up the inclines by cable and pulled between cable heads by horses - later replaced by locomotives. I think the ‘standard’ canal barge made three carloads. Eventually they gave way to the greater speed of the more-or-less parallel PRR.
That’s because the State of Pennsylvania make the Pennsylvania Railroad buy its main line of public works. Then J. Edgar Thomson came along and built the horse shoe curve.
Actually I think incline planes were a Rube Goldberg invention if ever there was one.
Actually, I think they are the opposite of a Rube Goldberg invention. Goldberg machines use a complex method to do a simple task. The inclined planes like the Allegheny Portage RR used a simple method to do a complex task. Thing of beauty and a hallmark of American ingenuity if I ever seen one.
Well, Zugmann, I can’t agree with your here. The task was complex alright. And I suppose that was the only way to cross the mountains in those days. But breaking a canal boat into three pieces, floating each into a cradle, and hauling it up a mountain by a series of engines and inclined planes strikes me as anything but simple. I mean before John Augustus Roebling brought wire rope to the country (about 1845) they had to use hempen hawsers. They broke. I see it as hard, complicated work.
But at the heart of the matter is the inclined plane. One of the simple machines. The steel cables broke, too, that’s why they had the brake devices that were towed behind the cars.
You don’t give up easy, Zugmann. Yeah, I suppose an inclined plane is a simple machine that can help you move heavy loads with must less effort. After all, the pyramids were built using inclined planes. But I just don’t see that installing and operating an inclined plane over a mountain was really all that simple. Conceptually simple, but the actual process seems more complex, at least to me.
True, it was a complex system of the use of simple machines. But it was far from a Rube Goldberg contraption…
To be a Rube Goldberg type of process it would have included: bowling balls that roll down pairs of rods to knock over a stack of dominoes to scare a bird into flying into a net that is attached to an electrical switch that will then turn on a fan to blow bubbles that a cat will swat at and in the process swish its tail to knock over a burning candle that will set fire to a fuse that will set off a firecracker that will scare a monkey into running up a ladder that will tip over when he gets to the top and release a bunch of marbles that will roll down the mountain to fill a bucket attached to a rope that will then, using a pulley, lift the barge up a short section of track.
A Rube Goldberg will use totally useless and unrelated processes to link one action to produce the desired result in a complex; And any of these processes could easily replaced with other totally useless, unrelated processes to get the same result.
You guys are arguing about the wrong thing, in increasingly irritating language.
The issue with planes is not whether they are more or less ‘simple’ or involved in construction vs. locks. It has much more to do with where the lock filling water will come from, there being relatively few high-volume springs or rivers in, say, the Northeast Pennsylvania Alleghenies.
Where grades exceeded practical adhesion working, planes survived very late indeed – probably as late as there was an effective market for what the mines were providing.
And if you want to avoid cables, it’s not that darn difficult, is it? If the whole idea of canal transport hadn’t been rendered more or less moot (compared to railroads) in most places in the States by the time practical rack systems with redundant brakes were being developed… or if Roebling hadn’t made wire rope cost-effective in the timeframe he did… you’d have seen more of that approach, as there is no limit on the length of plane, or on the effective grade rise, that would have been used… or necessary! – to get the job done.