When most of the pre-grouping British mainlineswere constructed in the 19th C, labor was probably cheaper here. There, an Act of Parliament was required to build a line and lines were built with quality to last more than a decade with lower grades, broader curves and protected crossings.
But here, an act of the Legislature was just as required to build most early lines. And the British built with expensive quality to last more tha a decade … with durable stone blocks holding fishbelly rails, hundreds of parsimonious little tunnels, loading-gage restrictions and a constant dominance of right-of-way people over operating men. So they were expensively locked into the 1830s forever. At least we figured out how to get to house size incrementally, and could make use of the few broad-gauge properties that were built out… and, in time, we came to our own understanding of how to build railroads to 100mph or higher standards.
The point that James Vance made in his “The North American Railroad” was that conditions in the U.S demanded a very way of building railroads. One consequence of the nearly level British railroads was that British locomotive makers didn’t have to design for high tractive effort, whereas once the US railroads figured out that a locomotive could pull a money making train up a practical grade, the emphasis turned to building to a much less expensive engineering standard.
As OM pointed out, the UK is stuck with 1830’s loading gauge. Ironically, the canal system in the UK also has very tight loading gauges, with maxium beam between 6 and 7 feet, height above waterline maybe 7 feet. The height limit in canal tunnels was to allow boatmen to propel the boats by laying down on top of the boats and using their legs to push against the top of the tunnels.
I don’t think this was necessarily the case at all; the first engine to exploit practical adhesion on substantial grade was the Gowan and Marx, and the track that locomotive ran on was heavy enough to carry the many loaded cars it could pull.
The real take-home message about ‘cheap’ came with Stevens’ “temporary track expedient” in 1827. Up until then I think there was sort of the same idea as in England that good track was damn permanent – heavy chunks of carefully-laid granite for piers, with stout fishbelly girders for rail between them. Unsurprisingly both the ride and the line and surface of such a thing was ridiculous, and the expedient American alternative of longitudinal wooden girders with strap rail was not much better. When Stevens used multiple ‘sleeper’ crossties to give a resilient ride, not requiring careful initial roadbed preparation and relatively easy to “keep” lined and surfaced, he was onto something we still use today; there are better fixed systems but they are very expensive both to build and maintain.
Keelboat ‘modularity’ was often remarked on in practice during the American canal era, to the extent that boats built to fit the canal ‘gauge’ could be knocked down for portage and reassembled, and taken apart for their lumber ‘downriver’ to solve the problem of how to make upriver trips before cost-effective steam was possible at other than steamboat-line size.
The real thing that was missed right at the beginning of railways was the Rainhill condition that all locomotives ‘consume their own smoke’. Had this been made a rigid condition … perhaps even to the requirement to sequester any visible or olfactory product of the lo
Soviets conceived of 2-14-4, later the engine truck got two axles. It was NOT an attempt to upstage Union Pacific (all the Cold War era one-upping came after the War); rather it was a way to get more tractive effort (enough to break link couplers, oops) whilst keeping the axle loadings low (the number, AA20-1 honors the Railway Commissar, Comrade Andreyev, and the intended twenty metric ton axle loading, see also the FD20 and OR23) as five year plan did not include steel for strengthening bridges, and Soviet railways were world’s widest dirt-track lines.
The discussion on leading trucks is instructive, I’m going to use some of that to get the model I’m building to track properly.
I thought I read somewhere that a 4-10-6 type was proposed. It might have been the UP or even the Pennsy. Or was I dreaming?
There is a pencil drawing of a 4-10-6 with RC poppet valves in the Casey Jones Museum’s collection in Jackson, TN. This followed a sketch in what I recall to be a '70s issue of Trains; I don’t now remember if the ‘original’ was Townsend’s 4-8-6 with the additional driver pair ‘imagineered’ in; it would certainly seem to make better sense to do a 2-10-6 but this might be a consequence of the heavier weight of all the RC valve-gear components in the area of the cylinder block.