I couldn’t decide which rail thread to put this in, but I did want to get our DTR Community rail experts to weigh in on if the following claim has any validity. It’s at least funny if nothing else.
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That’s an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Well, because that’s the way they built them in England, and English engineers designed the first US railroads. Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the wagon tramways, and that’s the gauge they used. So, why did ‘they’ use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that same wheel spacing. Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break more often on some of the old, long distance roads in England . You see, that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts. So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England ) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since. And what about the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match or run the risk of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder ‘What horses ass came up with this?’, you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses’ asses.)
Now, the twist to the story: When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses’ behinds. So, a major Space Shuttle design feature, of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system, was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse’s ass. And you thought being a horse’s ass wasn’t important? Ancient horses’ asses control almost everything.
Moderate which is 1980s conservative in today words. They are Livable Raleigh too. I just hope young voters don’t fall for the kool aid. And next year council elections will be crucial especially if there’s talk of expanding to 4 years.
I’ve read a couple things online saying anywhere from it’s not true to it is true, but for trivial reasons. Snopes has a good article on it. Their conclusion is that it’s not really about a direct line of copying what came before, but more about fulfilling the same needs over long periods of time.
Marveling that the width of modern roadways is similar to the width of ancient roadways is sort of like getting excited over a notion along the lines of “modern clothes sizes are based upon standards developed by medieval tailors.” Well, duh. Despite obvious differences in style, clothing in the Middle Ages served the same purpose as clothing today (i.e., to cover, protect, and ornament the human body),…
Most of the railroads in the South were broad gauge, the reason for which was that it allowed for wider equipment to more efficiently load cotton bales. This lasted until the Reconstruction era, when it became apparent that interoperability with the system of the North was crucial to rebuild the South, as breaks of gauge were extremely inefficient. So, in 1886, all the rails and rolling stock were converted from 5 ft gauge to 4’ 9" (“almost” standard gauge) over two days.
Yeah, anyone familiar with the many, many actual gauges that railroads use will know it’s a vast oversimplification.
“Loading gauges” (width of the car body above the wheels) also vary substantially; this has been a big problem for things like Triangle rail transit proposals because we can’t have high platforms (much better for passengers to not have to climb a bunch of steps) and freight trains on the same tracks.
The News & Observer published this article that summarizes GoTriangle’s latest decisions about regional/commuter rail. Nothing in this article should be surprising to anyone who’s followed this thread, but here are key passages for those of y’all who need a reminder (or are too lazy):
GoTriangle cannot build regional rail, today, in a responsible way. BUT, unlike 2006, they're willing to play the long game to ensure that it will still happen eventually.
After all, one of the subsection headings in the article is:
To go into more detail about that:
This is where we need to remember that a lot of the infrastructure needs (many in Durham, but some in Cary and Raleigh, too) are lumped together into the $3 billion price tag. This is mainly because, without those upgrades, NCRR and Norfolk Southern have said repeatedly that it’s impossible to run trains without it being frequently delayed or blocked by Amtrak/freight trains, and/or we run them so infrequently that it’s not useful for anyone.
This means we can’t skimp on the scope of this project beyond some cost-cutting measures that this study has already pointed out. But:
So, naturally, it’s ridiculous to ask just the feds and local governments to pitch in; the state should be helping us as well. But we know that direct funding of transit projects is something that North Carolina’s ruling political party is openly hostile to (and negotiations are non-starters since they have a supermajority), so we have to chip away at that $3B price tag by other means. Thankfully, there is a powerful way to do just that:
And just to put that one criticism to rest, once and for all:
GoTriangle knows that it's no longer enough to just focus on 9-to-5 commuters in this post-Covid world.
Raleigh/NCSU need to work out some sort of high density mix-use corridor from PNC arena to the rail line 1 mile south. If we thought like Japan we would build a high-end shopping mall and apartment complex right on top of the rail line with a mix-use corridor leading to the PNC Arena.
Japan has a lot more control over its land but I think the NCSU master plan (if implemented properly) will help to bridge the gap between downtown and the majority of its campus. Also, during the build out process it will most likely cause developers to bridge the gap between main campus and PNC.
I wonder how feasible that even is anymore. The 2021 estimate to implement commuter rail up through the lake towns of Huntersville, Cornelius, and Davidson was somehow $671M, and that was just the bare minimum current single-track alignment.
Ideally regional rail should run from Charlotte up to Mooresville, with daily further connections to Winston Salem. But that would likely be monumentally expensive as the entire route from Charlotte is single-tracked and many stretches are in various stages of disrepair.
I was thinking we could get private investors to help fund the commuter rail, or we could wait for inflation to cool down which could bring down the cost, but there are ways to get around federal and state funding. Detriot Q-line was initially privately funded, then the Feds gave em some money.
