It is a nice article. Summary is they wanted lighter cars so accel/decel would require less power and the gas/brake system would be lighter/smaller. So then the wider gauge is helpful to increase lateral stability (to prevent tipping over) since the cars are so light.
In my opinion these kinds of historical mechanical/civil engineering stories are quite interesting. Would love to see more.
There's the Toronto gauge, the Japanese high speed rail gauge (which is standard, 1435mm, for the world but wider than what was used before in Japan, 1000mm and less) and the Spanish high speed rail gauge (which is also standard, 1435mm, even though they usually use Iberian gauge which is wider - and on this, they have some interesting train designs that are capable of automatically switching between the two).
I recently read that although the Spanish high speed lines don't have many passenger trains (the recent Perpignan-Figueres tunnel only has two per day, although that's partly because of corona), they also carry through freight traffic from France because there's no break-of-gauge. A bit unusual for a high speed line, but why not.
There’s also the 1600mm Irish gauge which historically was down to picking a compromise between two standards used in lines built in the 19th Century. Some Irish rail engineers brought it with them to places like Australia and Brazil.
There's a fun story about BART: the US decided to go with a blank slate approach to railway design by hiring not railway engineers but aerospace engineers, and consequently the project relied heavily on reinventing the wheel. This track gauge thing happens to be one of many examples.
As BART decided to forego any standard way of doing mundane railway tracks, they had to endure decade-long delays and huge budget overruns to cover up their loss. Otherwise there would be nothing to talk about a mundane rapid transit system which already covers pretty much the whole Europe.
There's a small gauge (I think 2 feet) used mainly for moving pineapples and sugar cane around on plantations. The rail is readily available so it's used for other purposes too. I saw it used for material handling in rail shops in Canada, and it was always called "pineapple gauge".
another reason they're nonstandard is to keep freight rail companies from demanding to use them. part of the reason rail on the us is so slow is freight companies have had a 150 year monopoly on the right of way.
another reason they're nonstandard is to keep freight rail companies from demanding to use them. part of the reason rail on the us is so slow is freight companies have had a 150 year monopoly on the right of way.
You're confusing two different topics.
Freight railroads cannot "demand" to use rail lines owned by passenger railroads. Passenger railroads can, if they choose, allow freight lines to use their tracks, and vice-versa.
You can see examples of both in Chicago. CTA, a passenger railroad, used to carry freight traffic, but chooses not to do so anymore. Meanwhile, the local freight railroad companies choose to allow Metra, another passenger railroad, to use their tracks and rights-of-way.
It's not anywhere close to the black-and-white situation you present.
Where passenger railroads own their tracks, they get to decide what runs on them. The problem is that passenger railroads in the United States own very little actual track, and rely too heavily on using freight-owned tracks.
There's lots of railroad magazines that write about this ongoing problem every month.
Good to know it was for steadiness against the wind given its light construction and the original intent to have if go on (under?) the GGB deck.
I’d like to know why the tracks are flat and not angled and require regular grinding down to even out the washboard effect this causes… which results in that high pitched sound whenever it enters a curve due to slippage.
Everyone is trying to explain this but the reason is that BART was designed and built by a company that previously built dams, and in their hubris decided that the rail industry had nothing to teach them. It was the Space Age and Americans were absolutely overflowing with hubris.
Correction: the rails are flat, it's the wheels that are also flat. So pretend the above are the upper half of the wheel profiles.
End result is more surface contact = more noise/squealing, also less self-centering of the wheels on the tracks, so the lips also brush against the rails. I think this also exacerbates the washboarding of the rails.
Huh, the MBTA Green Line in Boston has a couple of sharp turns where it makes unbearable high pitched shrieks too, I wonder if it's also using flat tracks...
The Green Line still is very much a streetcar at heart, and at those kinds of tight radii no amount of rail inclination (that is no reasonable amount of inclination, after all the whole shebang still needs to work on tangent track, too) will be able to compensate for the difference between outer and inner wheels.
The best you can try is add some sort of lubrication, but even that won't fully quieten it down, since you can only lubricate the flanges, but not the running surface for hopefully obvious reasons.
Despite the District’s claim, I still wonder if the Southern Pacific had a hand in the choice of a non-standard gauge, to help make sure they’d never be ordered to take over BART and bear its operating losses. That risk might seem slight today, but it would have been more of a concern in that era, years before Amtrak, when railroads were being required by their regulators (ICC and CPUC) to operate other unprofitable passenger services.
As the posting concedes, “The pamphlet does not specify why only the wide gauge of five-feet-six inches was tested and not others.”
There was little if any cooperation like that. The BART engineers were there own little tribe and let people know from up on high how things would go. This wasn't just the choice of gauge, it was everything about the design. In particular the collision avoidance system was conceived with very little input and took many years to sort out. The idea that BART engineers took input from Southern Pacific or anyone else has no supporting evidence and is counter to what is known about how they operated.
In a nutshell, for added stability back when it was thought that BART tracks would follow the lower deck of the Golden Gate Bridge:
> Michael Healy, a BART historian and the former BART Director of Public Affairs, believes the use of the broad gauge “goes back to when BART was planned to go across the lower deck of the Golden Gate Bridge,” he told BART recently.
> “High winds coming through the gate would have required more stability for the aluminum-shelled cars. Thus, the wide gauge, as I recall,” he said.
Why that particular gauge (five-feet-six-inches) and not the more widely-used standard ( four-feet-and-eight-and-a-half inches)?
> The pamphlet does not specify why only the wide gauge of five-feet-six inches was tested and not others. One possibility is that the broad gauge was among the more widely used gauges in other countries. Another theory is that complex calculations were required, thus limiting alternatives that could be practically evaluated at the time.
I mean, if your train car has a width W, why not also make the track gauge also W? That would maximize stability, and you already need the footprint of W cleared and leveled anyway so you might as well just set it at W and not risk anything.
Because there's a only slightly smaller standard track gauge that's well understood and has evolved over 150 years, has suppliers available for your every need, and can interoperate with standard rolling stock. Seeing how BART turned out they would have done well to stick to more standard approaches instead of badly reinventing the basics.
Standards exist for a reason. Almost all rolling stock in the US and much of the world is set to this gauge because it was good compromise. By using a nonstandard gauge, they have forever limited themselves to completely custom rolling stock and related components.
The decision to use wide gauge, however it was it was decided, contributed to BART becoming one of the most expensive rail systems in the US to maintain.
But it also brings to mind buying a house with an unusual roof. It ended up giving us tons of problems and costing a ton of money to fix and replace because it required a ton of specialist work.
The roof guy left me with some good advice: "you want a roof that looks like all the other roofs around you".
In the 19th century, two competitors set out to build railways in England. Brunel in the south, Stephenson in the north. Stephenson used what's now called the standard gauge because the axon length was already in use for horse chariots and therefor easily available. Brunel however, set out to find the optimal gauge and settled on a wider one (around 2m). He also invented the black box as a side effect to prove his gauge was better and provided more stable rides. When it became time to connect the two railway systems, they settled on Stephenson's preference for political reasons.
> I thought Stephenson gauge was chosen because there were a lot more rail miles and rolling stock using that gauge than Brunel gauge.
That was key reason. The other was that 7ft gauge limits how tight your corners can be versus standard gauge. There are other minor disadvantages, such as that because trains are bigger, tunnels need to be wider.
The 7ft gauge trains were probably a lot more smooth though. And that extra ~3ft would make them feel much more spacious. Luxury was a big prestige element on the Great Western.
From wikipedia:
Stephenson's gauge was chosen on the grounds that existing lines of this gauge were eight times longer than those of the rival 7 ft or 2,134 mm (later 7 ft 1⁄4 in or 2,140 mm) gauge adopted principally by the Great Western Railway
> He also invented the black box as a side effect to prove his gauge was better and provided more stable rides.
There's an interesting chapter in the memoirs of Charles Babbage (he of the Difference and Analytical Engines) where he describes his experiences with the first railways and how he did some experiments on Brunel's Great Western route and built (one of, or possible the?) first dynamometer cars:
That chapter also contains this priceless bit where after Babbage had only by luck narrowly avoided a head-on collision with Brunel going the other way on the same track, Brunel replies that if Babbage's train had actually been approaching the other way on the same line, "he should have put on all the steam he could command, with a view of driving off the opposite engine by the superior velocity of his own."
Not just carpet, but padded wool seats -- those were replaced with padded water-repellant vinyl a decade ago, which sounds like a long time until you realize that it had cloth seats for 40 years before that.
Absorbent wool was, as you might imagine, unbelievably nasty. Among other things I saw on BART, I once saw a guy with severe flesh necrosis on his foot sit with said foot, bandages taken off, pressed against the seat. Of course, minor issues like diarrhea and vomit stains were more typical.
As why carpets and wool, the answer is actually just about as interesting as the linked article. Back in the 60s / 70s when BART started operating, it was one of the first metro subways. Its creators envisioned it as a futuristic luxury ride, whisking businesspeople and tourists in and out of far-flung suburbs to the glimmering high-rises of San Francisco. Everyone would be wearing a suit or a nice dress, and they would sigh in relief each time they daintily sat down in these airline-style seats.
The actual future turned out to be a bit more disappointing...
Have you ever seen the drawings from the late 1800s of what the subway was supposed to be in NYC? The future has been disappointing people for a very long time.
Because BART is an urban subway marketed to the white flight suburbanites. It was supposed to be luxurious not usable. That's why you got two doors at the cost of boarding speed and tons of seats at the cost of standing room.
I've used public transportation all over the world (Japan, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul, London, Paris, Rome, Istanbul, Barcelona, Brussels, Antwerp, Berlin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam). Of those, SF's is by far the worst. SF might be #3? in the USA (NYC->Chicago->SF) but it's still arguably crap compared to all those others. The Muni effectively has no schedule. Just show up and pray. There's no way to plan your trip except to go 30 minutes early. The Bart rarely comes since there's effectively one bottleneck track so you have to wait 20-30 minutes for the correct train. The muni actually has the same problem. The Bart is also so loud that I suspect it breaks pretty much every 1st world country's occupational safety hazard rules and is effectively ruining commuter's ears. It's a horrible experience.
In the United States, being the 3rd best city in public transportation is infinitely better than having literally zero reliable public transport because everything is car first. suburbia is quite a miserable experience and it's tragically justified because we don't know what we don't know.
i haven't traveled the world and experienced the worlds best public transit. rather, i've grown up in Los Angeles where we can't conceive that a public transit system could possibly be of any value. "what poor lowly miserable soul can't afford a car? SHAME SHAME on you poor soul"
Anything is better than the suburban denial that is the concrete jungle. I love Bart.
It’s hilarious that LA is building out a ton of track but they put all the stations in highway medians, guaranteeing that it will never be a useful mode of transportation ever.
In terms of urban rail transit SF can’t really be considered #3
SF is #5 in total ridership and significantly worse than that when you look at ridership per mile.
I think with a mix of subjective and objective measures I can declare with some confidence that most people would take NYC, Washington DC, Chicago, and Boston over SF’s transit.
Readit News
In my opinion these kinds of historical mechanical/civil engineering stories are quite interesting. Would love to see more.
There's the Toronto gauge, the Japanese high speed rail gauge (which is standard, 1435mm, for the world but wider than what was used before in Japan, 1000mm and less) and the Spanish high speed rail gauge (which is also standard, 1435mm, even though they usually use Iberian gauge which is wider - and on this, they have some interesting train designs that are capable of automatically switching between the two).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_gauge_in_Ireland
the Bay area has intense winds?
If they didn't wanted to reinvent the wheel, they could have adopted another standard railway track gauge: the Iberian gauge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian-gauge_railways
There's a fun story about BART: the US decided to go with a blank slate approach to railway design by hiring not railway engineers but aerospace engineers, and consequently the project relied heavily on reinventing the wheel. This track gauge thing happens to be one of many examples.
As BART decided to forego any standard way of doing mundane railway tracks, they had to endure decade-long delays and huge budget overruns to cover up their loss. Otherwise there would be nothing to talk about a mundane rapid transit system which already covers pretty much the whole Europe.
You're confusing two different topics.
Freight railroads cannot "demand" to use rail lines owned by passenger railroads. Passenger railroads can, if they choose, allow freight lines to use their tracks, and vice-versa.
You can see examples of both in Chicago. CTA, a passenger railroad, used to carry freight traffic, but chooses not to do so anymore. Meanwhile, the local freight railroad companies choose to allow Metra, another passenger railroad, to use their tracks and rights-of-way.
It's not anywhere close to the black-and-white situation you present.
Where passenger railroads own their tracks, they get to decide what runs on them. The problem is that passenger railroads in the United States own very little actual track, and rely too heavily on using freight-owned tracks.
There's lots of railroad magazines that write about this ongoing problem every month.
I’d like to know why the tracks are flat and not angled and require regular grinding down to even out the washboard effect this causes… which results in that high pitched sound whenever it enters a curve due to slippage.
In short there is no reason. It was a mistake.
End result is more surface contact = more noise/squealing, also less self-centering of the wheels on the tracks, so the lips also brush against the rails. I think this also exacerbates the washboarding of the rails.
The best you can try is add some sort of lubrication, but even that won't fully quieten it down, since you can only lubricate the flanges, but not the running surface for hopefully obvious reasons.
As the posting concedes, “The pamphlet does not specify why only the wide gauge of five-feet-six inches was tested and not others.”
Deleted Comment
> Michael Healy, a BART historian and the former BART Director of Public Affairs, believes the use of the broad gauge “goes back to when BART was planned to go across the lower deck of the Golden Gate Bridge,” he told BART recently.
> “High winds coming through the gate would have required more stability for the aluminum-shelled cars. Thus, the wide gauge, as I recall,” he said.
Why that particular gauge (five-feet-six-inches) and not the more widely-used standard ( four-feet-and-eight-and-a-half inches)?
> The pamphlet does not specify why only the wide gauge of five-feet-six inches was tested and not others. One possibility is that the broad gauge was among the more widely used gauges in other countries. Another theory is that complex calculations were required, thus limiting alternatives that could be practically evaluated at the time.
The decision to use wide gauge, however it was it was decided, contributed to BART becoming one of the most expensive rail systems in the US to maintain.
But it also brings to mind buying a house with an unusual roof. It ended up giving us tons of problems and costing a ton of money to fix and replace because it required a ton of specialist work.
The roof guy left me with some good advice: "you want a roof that looks like all the other roofs around you".
In the end, it seems it's good enough. Both high speed trains as well as the heaviest freight trains ever work fine with standard gauge.
That was key reason. The other was that 7ft gauge limits how tight your corners can be versus standard gauge. There are other minor disadvantages, such as that because trains are bigger, tunnels need to be wider.
The 7ft gauge trains were probably a lot more smooth though. And that extra ~3ft would make them feel much more spacious. Luxury was a big prestige element on the Great Western.
There's an interesting chapter in the memoirs of Charles Babbage (he of the Difference and Analytical Engines) where he describes his experiences with the first railways and how he did some experiments on Brunel's Great Western route and built (one of, or possible the?) first dynamometer cars:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Passages_from_the_Life_of_a_P...
That chapter also contains this priceless bit where after Babbage had only by luck narrowly avoided a head-on collision with Brunel going the other way on the same track, Brunel replies that if Babbage's train had actually been approaching the other way on the same line, "he should have put on all the steam he could command, with a view of driving off the opposite engine by the superior velocity of his own."
Absorbent wool was, as you might imagine, unbelievably nasty. Among other things I saw on BART, I once saw a guy with severe flesh necrosis on his foot sit with said foot, bandages taken off, pressed against the seat. Of course, minor issues like diarrhea and vomit stains were more typical.
As why carpets and wool, the answer is actually just about as interesting as the linked article. Back in the 60s / 70s when BART started operating, it was one of the first metro subways. Its creators envisioned it as a futuristic luxury ride, whisking businesspeople and tourists in and out of far-flung suburbs to the glimmering high-rises of San Francisco. Everyone would be wearing a suit or a nice dress, and they would sigh in relief each time they daintily sat down in these airline-style seats.
The actual future turned out to be a bit more disappointing...
What does that mean? It wasn't the first in anything by any stretch of the imagination.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/56200fcee4b020...
Uhh. No. London had the Underground literally 100 years before this and Boston had a subway around 1900. Paris, Moscow.. many subways predate BART.
Even local transit, e.g., BVG frequently uses fabric as seat material.
You just have to design it to be able to be cleaned easily and quickly.
Deleted Comment
i haven't traveled the world and experienced the worlds best public transit. rather, i've grown up in Los Angeles where we can't conceive that a public transit system could possibly be of any value. "what poor lowly miserable soul can't afford a car? SHAME SHAME on you poor soul"
Anything is better than the suburban denial that is the concrete jungle. I love Bart.
Dead Comment
SF is #5 in total ridership and significantly worse than that when you look at ridership per mile.
I think with a mix of subjective and objective measures I can declare with some confidence that most people would take NYC, Washington DC, Chicago, and Boston over SF’s transit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_tr...