Welcome to two questions. 1. Why did Broad Gauge Fail? 2. Why do we have the rather specific 4ft 8.5 inches here in the UK and maybe over 50% of the rest of the world.
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Usual notices:
1. We are not historians. We enjoy researching and learning stuff, and with that we enjoy sharing our journeys with you. That said, sources for information often listed below with credits.
2. Errors. Whilst we make every attempt to not include any errors, research, and piecing stories together from dozens of sources sometimes leads to one or two. I will note this here if any are found:
Errors and Omissions:
1. Yup, I didn’t go into any detail on the Loading gauges! Maybe another video one day.
2. £ 108 Million… approx figure is correct, as opposed to what i suggested in word.
3. Additionally (From “Dizwell”), De re metallica was written in 1556 ish by a German chap named Georg Bauer, though his baptismal name was actually “Pawer”. Both German forms translate as ‘farmer’, so when he did the Renaissance elite thing of Latinising his name, he became Georgius Agricola (because ‘agricola’ is Latin for farmer).
In any event, the guy describing the early carriage/rail way is not Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the ancient Roman governor of Britain in the first century AD, whose 19th century statue at the restored Roman Baths in, er, Bath you display at the 3:31 mark.
In short: there are two entirely different Agricolas, however you pronounce them, separated by around a millenium and a half …and the use of the statue of the one when citing the writings of the other, as if they were in any way related, is a bit of a blunder.
Sources:
https://garethdennis.co.uk/ – @GarethDennisTV
https://garethdennis.medium.com/the-not-so-glamourous-origins-of-standard-track-gauge-2b5f1ae7e3bc
Various owned books
https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Stephenson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-gauge_railway
Credits:
Actor: Matthew Evan Jones.
Filter: Snowman Digital and Beachfront B-Roll
Maps: Google Maps
Maps: National Library of Scotland
Maps: OS Maps. Media License.
Stock Footage: Storyblocks
Music: Storyblocks
Pictures credit: (Wiki creative commons unless specified).
Thumbnail Track: Walter Siegmund
Didcot mixed gauges: AfterBrunel via wiki
Track Picture as part of quick flick through: Matt Buck
Track Picture as part of quick flick through: Walter Siegmund
Track Picture as part of quick flick through: Geoff Sheppard
Track Picture as part of quick flick through: G-13114
Track Picture as part of quick flick through: KG lavin
Plateway Cart and track image: Tina Cordon
Cart Rut: dan diffendale
Early European Mining Cart: Lokilech
Plateway – Richard Trevithick railway: Brian voon yee yap
Broad Gauge at Didcot: chowells
NE England Waggonways colour by: North East Heritage Library
Transfer Shed at Didcot: Andrew Bone
Sir John Fowler: Lock and Whitfield
Chapters:
Intro: 00:00
What is a gauge: 01:17
How it started: 02:09
George Stephenson: 04:48
Binding: 06:27
Other Gauges: 08:16
The Fix: 10:59
Conduit bridge on the Bristol and North Somerset abandoned Railway and there’s something below us right now that’s really rare for this country come and take a look there are two things that have troubled me about railway gauges over the years but I’ve never really taken the time to understand
Them we know that today’s modern Railway gauges did not evolve from a Roman Chariot and subsequent Horse’s rear I’ll clear that up shortly if you missed a prior video so why exactly do we have a 4FT 8.5 inch Railway gauge in this country the
UK and number two it said that the wider the gauge or the greater the speed and efficiency and stability so why did brunell’s 7ft broad gauge fail welcome to the short history of the Railway gauge and of course here we are quite the rare thing for this country to find
Some in situ track in a hedge that wasn’t pulled up and reused in the 50s 60s and70s so when we talk about the gauge of a railway we’re talking about the inside the top of the rail heads to each other not talking about the middle the outside the sleepers
And they shouldn’t be confused with the loading gauge hold different subject we’ll come to that later so Railways here in the UK have what we call a standard gauge 48 1/2 inch or 1,435 mm now they didn’t start out like that despite the vast majority or a good percentage of
The world’s gauges being exactly that to find out what happened let’s step back 500 years or so when you start researching early Railways there is a rabbit hole and a half and I have no intention of going down that to answer my two questions suffice to say there is much evidence
That discusses cart ruts from Greece to Roman mines they’re all imply early Railways but we are talking Railways not ruts so let’s keep on the rails and for that we need to head to Cumbria so my budget doesn’t quite stretch to uh Cumbria for this video and perhaps more
Importantly my apathy to travel there late cold December is fairly High however instead we’ve now traveled a bit further to the uh East on the didcot Newbury in Southampton Railway to show you a few different types of rails that may or may not be hidden in the Hedge and of
Course go on a really enjoyable Railway walk which I haven’t done for quite some time Cumbria 1560s and the company of the mines Royale utilizing German and Austrian miners introduced a wagon way now it probably wasn’t the first but it’s one
Of the first documented in in fact Agri Cola documented similar wagon ways in his Works der Metallica the system used wooden planks and rails with wooden Wheels no flange in any way the rails were pinned to each other so as not to widen sounds a bit like
Chaos so these rails for mines popped up all over Europe so was there a need for them to conform to one another for them to be monitored in some way well of course not they were serving their own purpose within their own minds job
Done by the 1750s and 60s iron production was increasing hugely and the need to increase efficiency and the way things were moved and transported was Paramount plate ways were the next big thing emerging in the late 1700 s this system would allow unflanged Wheels to run on L-shaped metal plate
Ways now we’re almost stepping back into the cart rut territory here so let’s step forward and introduce perhaps one of the most important characters of the day now I’m walking this abandoned Railway I did promise you I’ll be a to show you some bits of
Infrastructure and maybe some old rails relevant to this line nothing is yet but however it has given us a spectacular view ahead almost like a hallway carve straight ahead of me as far as the eye can see a tiny Speck of light in the distance really beautiful really relaxing let’s get back
On the story let’s head to the north of England more specifically the northeast of England this area in particular is hugely important for the development and the technology behind these Earth rails and perhaps even more importantly than that it’s a playground for the likes of Stevenson to
Build on this technology and he did just that Killingworth Tramway was one such example and was where Stevenson’s Edge rail design was now being used in favor of the old plate way the edge rail being this the modern rail relied on flange Wheels now those original plate WS were 5T wide
A nice round measurement the plates themselves were around 4 in wide so when designing his edge rails 4ft 8 inches seemed a perfectly good measure to carry on using those wagons with a slight
Modification and thus we have the 4ft 8 inch gauge hang on a second so where did the 4′ 8 1/2 come from well according to the map there’s a uh lot of water either side here so I think I head down
This little pathway I may or may not find an old culvert and some architecture of some kind now Stevenson at this point was soon contracted to build two new Railways the uh the famous Liverpool and Manchester and they’re not so famous Bolton and Leigh both of these rails and Gauge were
Specified at 4ft 8 not 8 and half right there is no culvert here but there is something relevant to the video have a look at this this is used as the upright stantion of the fencing all the way along
This route and I feel like this is original broad gauge maybe when they ripped it up all over the network eventually or this is what they did with it they used it as uh various points of fencing but Stevenson wasn’t completely happy as the stock on the curve appeared to bind somewhat he
Increased the distance on the gauge by half of an inch which solved this seemingly with no stability issues at a point during the gauge Wars period Stevenson was asked why the 4′ 8 in his reply almost certainly in itself quashes the myth of the Roman gauge being adopted if I had only been
Called upon to do so it would be difficult to give good reason for the adoption of the odd measure 4FT 8 1/2 in the gauge really was an evolution of his own not one of over 2,000 years
Old so gages did evolve All Around the World in their own right their own Evolution and certainly exports from Britain in those very early days and mid 1800s well that did lead to the 4′ 8 and 1/2
In being quite significant around the globe but a lot of those other gauges did remain and they remained even within their own country and own variations just take a look at Australia quite the thing not only that but even within Britain Scottish Railway engineer misread some of the
Early documents on the Stockton and Darlington and assumed the 4 ft 8 was from the middle of the head of the rail subsequently for a Time his gauge was in fact 4′ 6 in and of course here in
The south of England we have Isambard Kingdom Brunell leading the charge on his Great Western Railway linking the uh the London to Bristol now he truly believed in efficiency and here we have another opportunity to try and find an old culvert and some infrastructure as a
Path goes down the side of this quite a big embankment here on the didcot Newbury and Southampton Rrailway now perhaps because he didn’t have the early influence of the mines from the Northwest maybe he thought outside of that world he chose the 7ft gauge over 2fT
Wider than Stevenson’s now adopted gauge 7ft or just over would give greater speed stability and efficiency so why ever didn’t that last once again no culvert, bit frustrating I thought we’d see something there but again we’ve got some more Rail and we’ve got got beautiful
Old fence that lined the railway here I love that the old wires that link them the pioneers of the time all busy building and insisting that their technology was the best had little idea of the overall picture it seemed they didn’t really foresee at this early stage of Need for joined
Up thinking and why would they brunell’s goal was the states for his steam boats he connected London to Bristol possibly for that reason but as time went on well Railways cropped up everywhere they linked every Community imaginable if you didn’t have a railway in your village we were
Extremely unlucky and of course what that meant is Railways became closer to one another and the gauges well of course they wouldn’t mix together so we had to have transfer stations like didcot and chard where the lines met and of course you’d have to disembark or you’d have to move Freight
One last ditch attempt to show you a culvert on this uh this rail we and uh I feel like there one just down here getting there isn’t quite so easy not because of the embankment and such but more
The water at the bottom but I think just down there is what I’ve wanted to show you quite a way um found it that’s to leave me my other camera behind cuz it got too sketchy but found the culvert quite significant as well this is going to
Be something else let going to take a quick look before we uh get back on the story structurally seen a lot better days all this original outside has been Re-concreted uh but four or five foot or whatever it’s back to its original brick lined don’t think it’s
Going anywhere um but it does give us a bit of context on um what a culvert under this huge embankment looks like just got a clamber back up the top without falling back down again in steps the Royal commission for Railway gauges in 1845 and the result is the regulating of Railway
Gauges act 1846 now owing to the fact that Stevenson’s gauge had almost over eight times more track laid while that decision was clear the 4′ 8 1/2 in would stick by moving forward we mean that there was no expectation that brunell and others had to rip up their track overnight but
Brunell did so anyway and within 20 or so years they started then converting every single line to standard gauge now when they did that they did that in style Oxford to tame line which is quite
Some distance Well that took just a few days to convert the entire line it said that the cost of change from broad to standard gauge was around about £800,000 at the time that’s something like 108 billion in today’s money it’s quite some significant outlay and at the uh at the time
1891 was reported by the times that it had been a failure uh economically commercially whichever way you want to read it into it which seems a bit strange on the face of it because perhaps had that gauge been more prolific in its early days well maybe that would have been adopted everywhere and
The world would look like a very different place but for the meantime we will probably never know it’s a w if of the age old infrastructure Tales if you’ve enjoyed these Tales well please feel free to join us every week and click on the Subscribe button below for more interesting things that
Just fall into my head and come out in the form of a video uh thanks for watching see you next time
29 Comments
13:08 How much is £800,000 in today's money. £108 billion as narrated, or £108 million as written in the caption?
Four-foot eight and a half inches is actually fifty six inches. Not 48 1/2 inches as someone typed for the captions early in the documentary.
It's good to challenge conventional wisdom, but not good to use it as clickbait. The question of gauge appears to become a chicken – egg thing. Oh no you say, it was the width of the wagons that determined gauge. But where did the wagons derive their width? Probably from Roman wagons and the paths they carved.
My theory is that a lot of early railway was laid on existing routes, canals, etc…
Hence brunel could create his own perfect guage as he had fewer prexisting infrastructure in his neck of the woods…just a thought
The graphic says 108 million but you said 1.8 billion. Which is it?
A 7' gauge is about 1.5 times as wide as standard gauge. This takes a lot more land to lay tracks and longer ties wider trucks on the trains. So more cost everywhere so unless efficiency can reduce the cost of operation it is not worth it.
Broad gauge would never have worked in the Western United States, where railroads had to cross mountain ranges (the Rockies, the Cascades, the Sierra Nevada, the Wasatch, and many others). The minimum turning radius for rolling stock, the maximum safe speed, the fore-and-aft spacing between bogies on the cars, and the design of the couplers, are all driven by the gauge of the rails, and when you use Broad gauge, you may gain some stability, and the ability to use wider rolling stock, but the other parameters, especially turning radius, become larger. In very steep terrain, even 4'-8.5" is too wide to accomodate a turning radius small enough to get a railroad through tight curves necessitated by terrain, and you see Narrow gauge, as on the Denver and Rio Grande Western the Durango and Silverton, and the White Pass and Yukon Route.
I have always wondered why this measurement became the standard myself. I guess it became standard in North America due to the imports from the UK.
Not sure what it is, but is very calming listening to this guy
Funny that history is full of references to ruts in Roman roads made by imperial chariots, which had a gauge that was likely measured in cubits and wide enough for two horses butts. Perfectly reasonable that early raildroad engineers built track that could permit horse drawn wagons. Funnily enough came out about because the roads in England built by ancient Rome featured this width between ruts. So about all you got right here was the 4' 81/2" part.
Who is this George Stevenson? I know of George Stephenson in connection with early railways.
You could have done all that in a smaller (studio) video, with a TV behind you, showing JUST the few pertinent clips, instead we watched someone walking along open pathways without any real railway content.?
Oh and YOUR standard gauge, isn't.
Why ?
Because it is NOT a world-wide standard, with a lot of countries having at least one different gauge, and sometimes TWO.
Even your own country, has different standard gauges, depending on where they are located, such as on the Romney Hythe & Dymchurch Railway, which has a "standard" gauge for their own (exclusive) uses, of just 15"
New Zealand, along with South Africa and several other countries, has a STANDARD GAUGE of 3'6" (or more precisely, 1062 mm, narrowed from 1068 to improve straight line running, without hunting, leaving curvature at different radii, to remain at greater widths to prevent binding)
Question – How would a different gauge have impacted the Sea Can?
Ironically Roman chariots weren't widely used at all, it was mainly a racing thing, and a circus thing just as today.
Britain and Libya are the places chariots were still in use in Roman times.
All civilisations famous for chariots, engaged in chariotry 5 to 10 centuries earlier.
Rome never used chariots for war, no matter what Ben Hur, or Gladiator would make you believe.
Carthaginians used chariots early in the punic wars, sort of – mercenaries recruited from Libya. (Numidian cavalry was well cavalry, not chariots – again despite what Gladiator would make you believe)
In a video about rail way gauge, what is all that about finding an old brick culvert about??
Very intersting story! Greetings from Germany! Here, many of the old railway embankments are used and trandsformed to cycle-pathways
In America before the civil war, all railroads had their own gages. They had to by law in many states. It was to keep the jobs provided at transfer points. After that standard gages were use except on rugged narrow gage mountain lines or privet lines like Disney's.
you still use feet and inches?😂
Nor from Napolean Bonaparte either which the MSM here are very keen on..Metres etc..Plus godforsaken addresses like Greater London.
Well, damn. There goes my café table anecdote about railroads and horses asses.
108B or 108M? Tou daid Billion but wrote it as Million…either way a lot of money for then or now
I still like the width of a roman horses bottom to the Space Shuttle booster dimensions story. Even if it isn't true.
The battle of the gauges was like Beta Max and VHS. More people bought VHS machines so they became standard.
Thanks 👍
The adoption of the standard railroad gauge, 4 feet 8.5 inches, can be traced back to England in the early 1800s. The gauge was initially used in wagonways and tramways, and its adoption for railroads was a natural progression. The US also uses the gauge.
7ft — likely didn't last due to cost and radiuses would be larger.
The advantages of broad gauge only really mattered during the early days of rail. Like it is more stable, which allows higher speeds, plus you can fit bigger boilers, however these were problems that you could engineer around with standard gauge. As locomotive and railway engineering advanced the advantages of broad gauge became smaller and the downsides of simply requiring more space and having less tight turns made it impractical. Also broader gauges do have some stability issues like if the train starts to tilt it'll lift off the track at a smaller tilt angle, hence why narrow gauge is so stable. Standard gauge doesn't have any particular technical merit but it does just sorta work in most situations and was complimented well by narrow gauge.
Nice, but it is quite a long speech for relatively few information…
It's sad that Australia has so many gauges. Queensland made a train link between Sydney and Brisbane difficult. To my knowledge, the dual gauge line between the NSW border and Brisbane central is the only one in Queensland, with all the other lines being narrow gauge. Another country worth mentioning is Japan, where all the local lines are narrow gauge, while the bullet train lines are standard gauge. To run the Shinkansen to Yamagata, they had to build a dual-gauge track where it's a rare example of a bullet train and local train sharing the same line.
The U.S. and the UK use the same track gauge, but the loading gauges are definitely very different, that's for sure. The U.S. has the heaviest loading gauge you will find basicaly, which allowed for supermassive locomotives like the Big Boy and the Yellowstones to exist. Of course, the UK had very different priorities from those of the U.S., though, and simply didn't need such massive locomotives or the need to have such tall height clearances commonly found on U.S. railroads.