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by tengwar2 69 days ago
The story about "the width of the backsides of two Roman horses" is just a myth. Which should be obvious if you look at the many different railway gauges in use. You can trace it back to 19C standardisation, and argue over whether Brunel's 7'ΒΌ" was better than standard gauge, or if we should all have converted to 3m Breitspurbahn, but that's a different question.
1 comments
cyberax 68 days ago
The thing is, it's not a _total_ myth. All the widespread standard railway gauges are very close to each other, within about 20 cm.
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tengwar2 68 days ago
Yes - but that's the gauges you are taking as standard. In fact narrow gauge railways are pretty common, since they are easier and cheaper to put through some landscapes. But as for main line high speed / high load railways, the balance of cost vs utility usually works out the same. Another major effect is standardisation in Victorian Britain (which is why Brunel's gauge on the GWR was replaced). Those engineers went out in to the wider world, and took standard gauge with them, and often the locomotives were manufactured in Britain. Hence the long distance railways often use exactly the same gauge - but the exact measurement was a matter of Parliament deciding on what compromise to draw based on early railway lines, bearing in mind that it was a lot easier to reduce gauge rather than increase it.
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cyberax 68 days ago
But this doesn't really contradict the myth. You certainly can have rail gauges that are _smaller_ than two horses' asses. You don't _have_ to use all the available width all the time.

It's the lack of something significantly larger that matters for this myth.

> Hence the long distance railways often use exactly the same gauge - but the exact measurement was a matter of Parliament deciding on what compromise to draw based on early railway lines, bearing in mind that it was a lot easier to reduce gauge rather than increase it.

The Russian railway was specifically designed to be incompatible with others (it's slightly larger) to make it harder for invading forces to use it. But even then it was not that much different from others.

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