At 03:42 PM 5/16/02 -0400, David Garrison wrote:
>And, further furthermore, weren't the Confederate railroads a hodge-podge
>of widths? Didn't this have something to do with lousy supply distribution
>at significant points in the war?
>

Quite true.  The prevailing guage in the South was 5', and continued to be
so into the 1880s.  But in the North as well there were several guages in
use, including, as I recall, the Erie.  During the War, President Lincoln,
railroad lawyer that he was, and in the absence of southerners in Congress,
took the opportunity to do a few things earlier presdents had tried and
failed.  One of these was to adopt the prevailing northern standard.

I guess this means that "technical" matters like railroad gauges are
influenced often by social factors, which was the point of the original
story anyway.

And consider transit and streetcar systems:  Several systems were
specifically designed to have a different gauge from standard so that
traffic couldn't interchange and freight wouldn't travel on them.  The BART
in San Francisco is one recent example.

When looking at Europe similar patterns hold.  Most of the Continent as
well as Britain use standard gauge today but Ireland, parts of Spain,
and the former Soviet Union use gauges wider than 4' 8 1/2".  Even in
England, where the railroad was invented, it took an act of Parliament
to determine what standard gauge would be.  The northern coal lines
pioneered by Stephenson used standard while the Great Western Railway
built by Brunel was 7' gauge.

Japan, South Africa, Australia, and India all use gauges that are
different than standard in many or most areas.

The lesson from all of this is that seemingly prosaic technical details,
like the gauge of a railroad, are influenced by many factors including
local conditions, political concerns, economic concerns, and even
technological momentum of the sort illustrated in the original story.

Fritz Efaw,
Emma Goldman Distinguished Professor of
Political Economy and Inorganic Psychology.