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A narrow-gauge railway (narrow-gauge railroad in the US) is a railway with a track gauge narrower than 1,435 mm (4 ft 8 + 1 ⁄ 2 in) standard gauge. Most narrow-gauge railways are between 600 mm ( 1 ft 11 + 5 ⁄ 8 in ) and 1,067 mm ( 3 ft 6 in ).
[18] [19] The Colorado Railroad Museum established in 1959, operates a demonstration loop of narrow gauge track in Golden, Colorado. [20] Stereograph of Utah's American Fork Railroad in the 1880's. In Utah, three foot gauge narrow-gauge railroads sprang up immediately after the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad on May 10, 1869.
The sharpest curves tend to be on the narrowest of narrow gauge railways, where almost all the equipment is proportionately smaller. [4] But standard gauge can also have tight curves, if rolling stocks are built for it, which however removes the standardisation benefit of standard gauge. Tramways can have below 100-foot (30 m) curve radius.
Measurement of track spacing from the rail head to rail head. By definition, the track spacing is given from centre to centre of a rail track. For an actual construction the distance is measured from the inside of a rail head to the matching one of the other track. As far as both tracks have the same gauge this is the same distance.
Many narrow-gauge railways were built in the United States with track gauge 3 ft (914 mm). The most extensive and well known systems were the 3 ft (914 mm) gauge lines through the Rocky Mountain states of Colorado and New Mexico. Today a few lines survive as heritage railways and tourist attractions.
The first version of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's 7 ft (2,134 mm) broad gauge system used rails laid on longitudinal sleepers whose rail gauge and elevation were pinned down by being tied to piles (conceptually akin to a pile bridge), but this arrangement was expensive and Brunel soon replaced it with what became the classic broad gauge track, in ...
Measuring rail gauge. During the early days of rail, there was considerable variation in the gauge used by different systems, and in the UK during the railway building boom of the 1840s Brunel's broad gauge of 7 ft 1 ⁄ 4 in (2,140 mm) was in competition with what was referred to at the time as the 'narrow' gauge of 1,435 mm (4 ft 8 + 1 ⁄ 2 in).
Derailment may take place due to excessive gauge widening (sometimes known as road spread), in which the sleepers or other fastenings fail to maintain the proper gauge. In lightly engineered track where rails are spiked (dogged) to timber sleepers, spike hold failure may result in rotation outwards of a rail, usually under the aggravating ...