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American Narrow Gauge Railroads by George Hilton w/ dust jacket
American Narrow Gauge Railroads by George W Hilton.
Hard cover with dust jacket
580 pages. Indexed. Stanford University. Copyright 1990.
Table of Contents:
Part I - The Narrow Gauge Movement
The origins of the Narrow Gauge Movement
The Economic Organization of the Railrods
The Cost Controversy
The Narrow Gauge Fever
Locomotives
Rolling Stock
Physical Plant
The Incompatibility Problem
The Decline of the Narrow Gauge
Part II - The Individual Narrow Gauge Common Carriers
Listed by states.
Index.
.Maps, photos, charts!
This is the first comprehensive, extensively illustrated account of the growth and decline of American narrow gauge railroading, a singular and still not fully understood episode in the history of American transportation. In its heyday, the narrow gauge movement produced a major investment in railroad facilities, incidentally also generating considerable intellectual controversy.
Advocates of the 3 foot or 3 foot 6 inch gauge claimed that narrow gauge roads were far easier and cheaper to build, maintain, and operate than their wider competitors. These arguments made them particularly attractive to investors seeking cheap entry into the railroad market, to people who opposed the rate structure of established railroads, to local promoters and civic boosters whose towns had been bypassed by existing lines, and to entrepreneurs engaged in extractive activities, such as mining and lumbering, in difficult terrain. At its peak in the United States, after a building boom between 1871 and 1883, narrow gauge accounted for some 12,000 miles of track.
The most grandiose vision of the American narrow gauge advocates was for a continental system that would provide cheap low-speed freight service between the grain-producing plains and the Atlantic seaboard. Yet the closest thing to a continental narrow gauge railroad to be built, the Grand Narrow Gauge Trunk between Texas and Toledo, Ohio, in the end proved to be a fiasco that fatally compromised the claims of the movement.
Despite the widespread conversion to standard gauge and the abandonment of many remaining narrow gauge lines in the late nineteenth century, narrow gauge roads continued to prove viable in limited contexts and as feeder lines through the 1920's. This fact, coupled with a sense that the narrow gauge philosophy was never given a really fair test, has resulted in a curious lack of consensus about this chapter of American railroading history. Not the least of the virtues of this study is that the author presents in full the arguments for and against the narrow gauge and subjects them to careful economic analysis. He shows that the narrow gauge advocates operated mainly on faith in
a set of engineering judgments that proved mistaken in practice, and he demonstrates clearly that "smaller and cheaper" was not "better" in the context of American railroading.
This became obvious as railroad networks expanded, as cartelization advanced, and as systems for interchanging cars developed. Narrow gauge railroads became obsolete as they coped with the high costs of transshipment (transferring freight from narrow gauge cars to standard gauge cars, and vice versa) and the maintenance of large stocks of incompatible equipment.
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