The Americas

by Michael Frewston

  The Americans seemed to have liked British trains running over their tracks, for once again, in 1939, another complete British train was shipped over. Consisting of the LMS Coronation class and a rake of LMS Coronation Scot coaches, the Duchess of Hamilton (swapping names with another Duchess) was initially displayed at the New York World’s Fair, before undertaking a national tour.

  An LNER A4 locomotive, No. 4496 Dwight D Eisenhower, was shipped in 1963 to New York Harbor, and travelled by rail (but not under its own steam) to the US National Railroad Museum in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The locomotive has since been repatriated back to its homeland, along with its sister locomotive Dominion of Canada, which has been resident in the railway museum in Montréal, Canada.

  There are also various other visits by British steam locomotives to the USA, the most recent being in 1969, when the LNER A4 Flying Scotsman spent three years touring the American continent.

  Britain was not the only country to ship motive power for use on US rails. France and Sweden both shipped locomotives as prototypes for use on the electrified North-east Corridor (NEC – see below), while Sweden, in 1992, shipped an X2000 (also known simply as the X2) high speed tilting train, also for use on the 200 km/h NEC. After five months on this assignment, it toured the rest of America as well as Canada (diesel-hauled of course once it was no longer ‘under the wires’ of the NEC), before being shipped back to Sweden.

  Germany got into this act also, sending an ICE train for testing on the NEC. In both cases, the Americans declined to buy, although the final choice of train, the Acela, does use a lot of French TGV technology.

  Narrow gauge:

  Up to this point, I have dealt only with Standard gauge and above. But the USA was also home to a huge network of narrow gauge railways.

  Unlike with their broader gauge counterparts, the narrow gauge railways in the USA more or less standardised on one particular gauge – 914 mm (3 ft 0 in). The first railway to start operating at this gauge, the famous Denver and Rio Grande railway, in Colorado, opened in 1871. Its owner, William J Palmer, had been convinced that building to the narrow gauge was as little as two thirds the cost of building to one of the wider gauges – something that later was proved to be untrue.

  Nonetheless, that same year saw the start of what has been termed ‘narrow gauge fever’. Driven by Palmer, a whole network of 914 mm gauge lines was envisioned, all linking up with each other, but obviously seeing little need to link up with the Standard gauge and wider railways. The final outcome of this vision would have been a complete ‘secondary’ or alternative US railway system, by-passing the existing main-line railways altogether. This was to have been a ‘Grand Narrow Gauge Trunk’ network, stretching from Ohio to Texas.

  Such a vision of course required a uniform gauge. In the year following the opening of the Denver and Rio Grande, a National Narrow-Gauge Railway Convention was held, at which the gauge of 914 mm was adopted by resolution. Consequently, well over 90% of the narrow gauge railways that were built used this gauge. It represented a complete contrast to the chaotic gauge situation for the wider-gauge main-line railways.

  There were, in addition to the 914 mm gauge railways, a few railways of other gauges, including 1067 mm (3 ft 6 in), 1016 mm (3 ft 4 in, and a decidedly odd gauge, belonging to the Pittsburgh and Castle Shannon Railroad), 762 mm (2 ft 6 in), as well as a considerable number of 610 mm (2 ft 0 in) lines. Almost all of these are now defunct, or are being run as tourist attractions, but the 610 mm gauge lines particularly once represented some significant route distances for such a narrow gauge. As an example, the Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes Railroad in Maine had a total length of some 180 km.

  By the late-1880s, some 19 000 km of narrow gauge lines were operating, mostly in the states of Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, the mid-west, and the far west states of Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. But this represented narrow gauge’s peak.

  The inability to compete with Standard gauge railways, together with the realisation that the costs of both building and operating at these narrow gauges (especially 914 mm gauge) were in fact not that much less than for the wider gauges, precipitated the end of ‘narrow gauge fever’, and the network started its decline. By the late 1960s, most of those railways that hadn’t closed down had been converted to Standard gauge, and less than 150 km of 914 mm and narrower gauge railway was still operating, all as tourist lines. Many are still in operation today.

  Main-line railways:

  It goes without saying that today all of America’s main-line railways run on 1435 mm gauge tracks. Nearly all of the vast route distance – nearly 230 000 km – sees little more than diesel-hauled freight trains, often 100 or more cars long, with six or seven locomotives being not uncommon. With a virtually unlimited loading gauge, just about anything can, and in fact is, carried by rail. America has the third highest level of freight carried by rail, at 62%. Only Russia and Canada see higher percentages.

  The only significant passenger operation, apart from commuter services in the larger cities, as well as Amtrak’s long-distance trains directed more towards the tourist than the passenger simply wishing to get from A to B, is the North-East Corridor. Stretching from Boston to Washington, via New York and Philadelphia (also between Philadelphia and Harrisburg in Pennsylvania), it is a relatively high speed frequent service connecting these cities and over twenty points in between. While the line is rated for up to 240 km/h in places, in practice 200 km/h is the normal maximum.

  For many years hauled by the famous ‘Pennsy’ GG1 locomotives, in the 1970s new motive power became necessary. Both French and Swedish locomotives were imported and trialled, running over American rails with almost no modifications (and certainly not their gauge!). The Swedish product, the Rc4, won out, and was locally produced under licence by General Motors, where it was designated as the AEM-7. Currently new motive power in the form of the Acela locomotive is now in operation.

  Will America ever see true high speed rail (300 km/h and above), on the lines of those operating in Europe, Japan and China? Proposals have been put forward for Standard gauge high speed lines between such city pairs as Los Angeles and San Francisco, or Chicago and Minneapolis/St Paul, as well as from one end of Florida to the other. However, most of these may actually have to share rails with conventional trains, and thus are unlikely to see speeds beyond 240 km/h. Will dedicated high speed lines ever see fruition? While as many as ten high speed corridors have been identified, America still seems to prefer the automobile and the airplane, so such proposals may never see the light of day.

  Interurbans:

  Interurbans were very much an American phenomenon, although in reality they can be considered to be the precursor to today’s light railways (LRTs), and many European tram networks were as much ‘interurban’ in concept as they were city-based urban trams. In general, interurbans in America became a secondary network of electric railways connecting closely spaced city pairs, or else they acted like a suburban railway, connecting a city centre with an outlying town or rural area, often by simply extending the original streetcar system. Even so, I shall treat interurbans and streetcars/light rail separately, although it would have often been hard to differentiate between the two during the interurbans’ heyday.

  This type of service invariably involved considerable distances of private right-of-way rural trackage in the outlying areas, using conventional rails, switching to street running in urban areas, using either typical grooved streetcar (tram) trackwork (known as girder rail in North America), or else non-grooved T-section rails but with a separate check (guard) rail.

  I went into some detail in Part 1 about how trams and streetcars used smaller wheel profiles than main line railways, which often caused problems when the two types of vehicle used the same trackwork (especially grooved tams track). The American interurbans had the same problems when resorting to using the same street tracks as the streetcars. Interurban vehicles were usually larger and faster than the streetcars they may have shared track
s with, with wheels with wider treads and deeper flanges. The deeper flanges of interurbans meant that sometimes they had to run on their flanges when traversing grooved tram tracks, but this caused heavy deterioration to the wheels themselves and increased wear to the rails. While some cities allowed the use of normal T-section rail, others mandated the use of grooved rails.

  On those occasions when interurbans shared the same tracks as main-line railways, they of course used the same gauge, usually Standard gauge (most interurbans didn’t appear until after America had standardised its gauges by the 1890s – see above). But they weren’t always able to use Standard gauge.

  As noted above, some of this track sharing was with in-town streetcar lines, many of which were built to something different from neighbouring Standard gauge railways – just to make sure that main-line vehicles, particularly freight cars, couldn’t access the streetcar tracks. In these instances, the interurbans of course had to be built to the same gauge as the streetcars. (It is interesting to compare this philosophy of denying access to main-line vehicles with that in the UK at around this time, when some UK tram lines were built to a gauge very slightly different from Standard, specifically in order to allow main-line freight vehicles to use the tram tracks to access docks and the like, the different wheel profile of the main-line wagons compared to that of the trams requiring this gauge adjustment – see Parts 1 and 2.)

  There was the occasional bit of dual-gauging where the interurban line was built to Standard gauge but needed to share the same street as an existing narrow gauge streetcar line. Such an instance was in Los Angeles, where the 1435 mm Standard gauge Pacific Electric Railway and the 1067 mm gauge Los Angeles Railway ran over the same dual gauge trackwork within Hawthorne Boulevard, Main Street and 4th Avenue. There were even a few short stretches of triple gauge track – but, as always with such contortions, the complexity proved too much.

  By the late 1920s, at the peak of interurban operations, around 25 000 km of interurban lines were in operation, stretching from one end of the country to the other, although the states of Ohio and Indiana saw unusually large concentrations of networks. Few, if any, of the original interurbans are operating today, having been killed off by the automobile from the 1920s, although some of the proposed new (and even reinstated) streetcar lines in a number of cities may be considered to be a revival of the interurban concept (these will be covered under Trams and metros, below).

  Trams and metros:

  Like we saw in Russia (see Part 4), the USA has a huge number of tram (streetcar) and metro systems. With over 60 cities (and at one time over 200), from Astoria and Atlanta to Washington and Yakima, each boasting at least one system (and some boasting as many as three or four), there are too many to describe individually here. As it happens, such individual descriptions are unnecessary anyway when reviewing their gauges, for, with just a handful of exceptions, they were – and still are, for those still operating – built to 1435 mm Standard gauge.

  Those relative few operating at something other than Standard gauge saw a plethora of gauges, many being typical narrow gauges (such 1067 mm), but also some very unusual ones, and even unique, used nowhere else. Over time these systems either shut down, or were converted to (usually) Standard gauge, such as the San Diego Trolley/Railway system, which ran on 1067 mm gauge tracks until 1898.

  For example, Trenton in New Jersey saw no fewer than four different gauges in its streets – 1435 mm (Public Service High Speed Line from Newark), 1524 mm (Trenton-Princeton line), 1575 mm, same as that in Columbus, Ohio (Trenton-Mercer County line), and 1588 mm (Pennsylvania Trolley gauge, used on Bucks County Interurban).

  Many cities have both trams and light rail, such as Boston, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco and Seattle. There is however rarely any connection between each city’s tram and metro (Boston and Philadelphia being notable exceptions) – the metro usually runs on third rail, while the trams use overhead wire current collection (and very often still using the old-fashioned trolley pole, rather than a modern pantograph).

  One of those exceptions, Boston’s Blue Line, uses third rail current collection for the underground sections, but switches to pantograph collection from overhead catenary once out in the open. The streetcars in Boston have switched from trolley pole to pantograph collection as they have been renewed or refurbished.

  Many US cities have either built or are planning new ‘heritage’ streetcar lines, such as Little Rock, Los Angeles, Memphis (currently suspended due to a number of safety issues), and Tampa. Without exception these new lines are to Standard gauge, and use either new-build heritage vehicles, or, and surprisingly often, refurbished old vehicles obtained from such disparate places as Melbourne in Australia, or Porto in Portugal. The common gauge of 1435 mm (as well as usually the same or similar voltage for electrical supply, generally 750 V DC) facilitates the easy transplant of these vehicles from one country to another.

  As regards subways and metros, New York’s subway system is of course one of the largest (and by some criteria, the largest) in the world. With 340 km of route distance over 30 or more lines, and with well over 400 stations, it is a vast network serving the city and well out into the suburbs and even beyond, making it as much a regional metro as an inner city underground subway. The entire system is to Standard gauge, and always has been.

  Of those metro and tram systems not using Standard gauge, the exceptions are few but notable, and usually involve a number of highly unusual (in fact, unique) gauges, found nowhere else in the world:

  Altoona, in Pennsylvania, used a variation of the Pennsylvania Trolley gauge (or perhaps it was the Irish gauge?) of 1600 mm, 12 mm wider than the 1588 mm that is considered to be the true dimension of this gauge.

  Baltimore’s streetcar system, now closed (other than the Streetcar Museum), used the unusual gauge of 1638 mm (5 ft 4.5 in).

  Cincinnati used to have an extensive street railway system that used the gauge of 1588 mm (5 ft 2.5 in), considered to be the true Pennsylvania Trolley gauge (see above). It closed in 1951.

  Columbus, Ohio, also once had a streetcar system, using another unusual gauge of 1575 mm (5 ft 2 in), again another variation of the Pennsylvania Trolley gauge. It is said that this was, as for the interurbans, a way to keep main-line railways from accessing street railways.

  New Orleans, Louisiana, has an extensive tram system. Claimed as the oldest operating street railway in the world, with much of it on its own right-of-way, and featuring either refurbished original cars or newly-built replicas, it uses the same 1588 mm Pennsylvania Trolley gauge as found in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (and previously in Cincinnati). Much of the original system was built to Standard gauge, but was converted to the Trolley gauge in 1929, as was the Riverfront line in 1997.

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has a total of five separate systems, all under the SEPTA umbrella – and three gauges. While its ‘light metro’ system, as well as one of its normal, or ‘heavy’, metros, uses 1435 mm Standard gauge, the other three systems use different gauges. Philadelphia’s Light Rail system uses the Pennsylvania Trolley gauge of 1588 mm, while its tram network, as well as the other metro (the Market-Frankford line), uses a variant of this, 1581 mm (5 ft 2.25 in). Quite why there are these two gauges, differing by just 7 mm (0.25 in), is not known, although both are referred to as the Pennsylvania Trolley gauge, so perhaps it’s more due a minor mis-measurement issue in the past rather than a conscious attempt to use two different gauges. This gauge was however legislated by a city ordinance for the three lines using this gauge

  Pittsburgh’s Light Rail system also uses the Pennsylvania Trolley gauge of 1588 mm. As this gauge is the same as that of the predecessor Pittsburgh Railways (dating from 1902), it is likely that this was the originator of the Pennsylvania Trolley Gauge.

  San Francisco, like Philadelphia, also sees the use of three gauges (1067, 1435 and 1676 mm), with two distinct entities running rail-based services. Muni, short for San Francisco Municipal Railway, runs the fa
med cable cars, using the gauge of 1067 mm. Muni’s F Market and Wharves heritage streetcar line (using trams from Melbourne) runs on Standard gauge, as does the new Muni T Line. The other system in San Francisco is a metro operated by BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit). With a route distance of 170 km, it runs on the broad gauge of 1676 mm (5 ft 6 in) (with ballast-less track and third rail current collection). This gauge was selected, so some say, to provide additional stability in the event of high winds when crossing the famous Golden Gate Bridge (a line crossing this bridge never transpired), or to better cope with an earth tremor – southern California of course being a high-risk earthquake area. Another cited reason was to ensure a smoother ride, although any such improvement, if indeed there is any improvement at all, would seem rather marginal. Other, less kind, remarks refer back to the old argument of preventing any interoperability with any neighbouring Standard gauge railways – particularly that of the Southern Pacific Railroad, which, it was said, foresaw the possible use of the metro lines, rather than its own heavy rail, to move freight cars around the Bay.

  The Washington, DC, metro, part surface and part underground, and opened in 1976, uses a slight variant of Standard gauge – 1429 mm. Again, quite why a gauge was selected that is such a minor difference between this and true 1435 mm Standard gauge is one of those mysteries!

  New tram systems are proposed, or even under construction, in a number of cities, such as Cincinnati, Washington DC, and others, in a resurgence of interest in this means of urban transportation, as is happening in many other countries.