Washington picks a different railway gauge ?

[Nik]

No, I've not gone off the rails...

Just watched a Discovery channel program about building of US Transcontinental railway-- during their Civil War, yet !!

Seems there'd been several different gauges ( gap between track etc ;-) about after ~ 1850, but George Washington chose 4 feet 8 and half inch as the new National standard...

So, what if he'd chosen the Great Western 6 feet ??

To start with, tunnels would need to be wider, curves' sweep greater and the trackbed cuttings / embankments significantly wider.

But, what if they'd agreed that the 'right of way' would allow for 6 feet gauge, build just the bridges wider, lay 4' 8.5" for now and come back later ??

 

[DaSla]

all i know is the russians have a different grade then the rest of europe, and thats for military reasons.

 

[JLCook]

No, I've not gone off the rails...

George Washington chose 4 feet 8 and half inch as the new National standard...

I thought George Washington died in 1798, LONG before the railroads! Did you perhaps mean "WASHINGTON", meaning the "the capital", ie, "the Government?"

 

[Tyr]

Don't Americans use standard guage?
If they do then it just makes sense for them to use that so they could import from Britain.

 

[wkwillis]

Bigger guage allows bigger and more powerfull steam engines for locomotives. Russia and Britain had a canal system to boost already in place transport, so the bigger guage made sense. Americans kept throwing railroads ahead as soon as possible, made as cheaply as possible, constantly being upgraded to handle more freight. That's where you build at a 6 degree slope so the locomotives they had then could only pull four cars, and then build at a three degree slope (costing roughly eight times as much) so the locomotive could pull eight cars up the more gradual slope.
That's a very rough explanation.