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4ft 8.5in - is it derived from a Roman chariot?

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DerekC

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I have searched to find a thread on this subject but can't find one - if there is please direct me to it!

My six year old grandson is at the stage of being interested in absolutely everything and has come across the story that the Stephenson gauge of 4ft 8.5in is derived from the Roman chariot and hence from the width of two horses bottoms, which of course he finds incredibly funny! I have told him it's not true, but of course what does Granddad know?

I have read the Wikipedia articles which just say "no evidence" - but is there anything out there which tests the theory a bit more rigorously? Ideally in a children-friendly format. Sounding very pompous, it might be a good lesson in "don't believe everything you read"!
 
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John Webb

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It was a process of evolution, but there is no evidence it goes back to Roman Chariots! ​
Horses drawing carts were far more common than chariots. The first 'plateways' were basically wooden tracks for carts, and you can proceed from there to horse-drawn wagons on rails. "The Oxford Companion to British Railway History" (Simmons and Biddle, OUP 1997) points out that most horse-drawn carts had wheels about 5ft apart to accommodate a (single) horse, and this led to the 4ft 8.5inch gauge when wagons were put on rails and eventually became steam-hauled.
Brunel's 7ft for the GWR was a conscious decision based on lowering the centre of gravity to improve safety/comfort etc, by having the wheels outside the loco and coach bodies rather than underneath said bodies.
 
tbtc

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Ianno87 said:
There just so happens to be a Twitter thread on this subject this morning...

https://twitter.com/GarethDennis/status/1177868616248770561?s=20
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I was reading that, and then the Snopes article which gently disagrees with it - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/railroad-gauge-chariots/

The eventual standardization of railroad gauge in the U.S. was due far less to a slavish devotion to a gauge inherited from England than to the simple fact that the North won the Civil War
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(which has now got me reading articles about the different gauges used, since I was unaware of the railway's importance in the North winning)

Essentially, the "horse's bum" idea is a simple story to tell, it's not wholly the reason, but I guess that it makes sense for railway carriages to be similar dimensions to horse drawn carriages (for freight, for sitting people two by two) - also I suppose some railways were built on canal formations, so similar space required?

(damit, @Darandio beat me to it with the Snopes reference!)
 
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Richard Scott

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Just to take this a stage further, weren't the dimensions of Space Shuttle booster rockets limited by the gauge of the railways as they were moved by train? So whatever determined the gauge dictated dimensions of certain vehicles for space travel (seem to remember there was something made about how the size of a horse influenced space shuttle design)? Happy to be proved incorrect on this if someone has further information.
 
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randyrippley

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False premise anyway: until the agricultural reforms of the 1700's provided more grain for horse feed, most hauled carts would have been drawn by oxen, not horses. And its fair to say many roads prior to the turnpikes would not have been suitable for wheeled transport anyway: that's why mules were used as pack animals (mules can survive on lower grade feed than horses).
As for the origin of Roman roads..........they built a network of long distance military routes, but on a more local basis they simply paved the existing tracks so its a good bet they simply built to the existing dimensions.

Finally, 4'8.5" wasn't a national standard anyway..........it was widened from an initial 4'8", which was peculiar to the northeast, in other parts of the country early industrial plateways / trackways used anything in the 4-5 feet range. There was a recent thread here which gave several examples of alternative gauges for early lines.
 
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Ianno87

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Richard Scott said:
Just to take this a stage further, weren't the dimensions of Space Shuttle booster rockets limited by the gauge of the railways as they were moved by train? So whatever determined the gauge dictated dimensions of certain vehicles for space travel (seem to remember there was something made about how the size of a horse influenced space shuttle design)? Happy to be proved incorrect on this if someone has further information.
Click to expand...

Though with NASA's budget, surpirising that it couldn't have stretched to re-boring a tunnel if it was necessary!
 
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PeterC

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John Webb said:
It was a process of evolution, but there is no evidence it goes back to Roman Chariots! ​
Horses drawing carts were far more common than chariots. The first 'plateways' were basically wooden tracks for carts, and you can proceed from there to horse-drawn wagons on rails. "The Oxford Companion to British Railway History" (Simmons and Biddle, OUP 1997) points out that most horse-drawn carts had wheels about 5ft apart to accommodate a (single) horse, and this led to the 4ft 8.5inch gauge when wagons were put on rails and eventually became steam-hauled.
Brunel's 7ft for the GWR was a conscious decision based on lowering the centre of gravity to improve safety/comfort etc, by having the wheels outside the loco and coach bodies rather than underneath said bodies.
Click to expand...
That does overlook the number of major, sub 4 foot, plateways around the South Wales borders. From memory (I don't have access to my books at the moment) mostly 3 ft 6. These included some quite long distance (for the time) operations such as Cheltenham to Gloucester and Abergavenny to Hereford.

From a lot of the railway histories that I read as a boy there was always the suggestion that the Surrey Iron Railway was unique. I think that most railway historians are more interested in kettles on wheels than in the actual railway.
 
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PeterC said:
That does overlook the number of major, sub 4 foot, plateways around the South Wales borders. From memory (I don't have access to my books at the moment) mostly 3 ft 6. These included some quite long distance (for the time) operations such as Cheltenham to Gloucester and Abergavenny to Hereford...….
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The Simmons and Biddle book mentioned in my previous post explains that the narrow-gauge railways were often the result of local geographical problems, or the need to take wagons that were loaded in quarries or mines to a port or other location. Frequently isolated, it didn't matter that they were not 'standard' gauge. The experiences in particular of the Festiniog Railway showed that narrow gauges could carry wagons and coaches of a size more associated with the 'standard' gauge, encouraging narrow gauges in developing countries as well as to a limited extent in the UK to enable cheaper and easier construction, especially in difficult terrain. So George Stephenson's example wasn't always followed!
 
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randyrippley

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Take Portland as an example, there were two incline rail systems supporting the quarries.
The "Merchants" railway was 4'6", while the "Admiralty" line was 7'

plenty of other examples of non-standard gauge from around the country
 
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I've always thought that 4ft 8 1/2 inches was quite narrow when coaches are 8ft (?) wide, and that they would not be so stable as a wider guage. Or do coaches have superb engineering to overcome this?
 
xotGD

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I recall hearing somewhere that wheel grooves in the stone slabs under Roman-era archways are typically 4 foot 8 and a half inches apart. Could be nonsense of course.
 
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MotCO said:
I've always thought that 4ft 8 1/2 inches was quite narrow when coaches are 8ft (?) wide, and that they would not be so stable as a wider guage. Or do coaches have superb engineering to overcome this?
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There are countries that have larger coaches and wagons on a narrower gauge than ours, so stability isn't really a problem. It's true that a train could go round a curve faster on a wider track gauge without overturning, but the speed on curves is set by when it becomes uncomfortable/dangerous for passengers. Even for tilting trains this is well below the overturning speed.
 
DerekC

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"Trains and Technology - The American Railroad in the 19th Century" by Anthony J Bianculli says:

… Walton Evans, an American engineer, measured the ruts at Pompeii and found them to be 4 feet 9 inches apart, center to center ….
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So maybe it's all his fault!
 
Lucan

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xotGD said:
I recall hearing somewhere that wheel grooves in the stone slabs under Roman-era archways are typically 4 foot 8 and a half inches apart. Could be nonsense of course.
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Not just archways. My understanding is that the better heeled parts of Roman cities had paved roads with grooves about a foot deep and wide for wheeled traffic. These obviously needed to be a standard sort of distance apart, so both ox carts and chariots needed to keep to this standard or stay out of the city. The grooves were not to guide the vehicles, they were to keep the mud from wheels off the main upper surface that pedestrians used.

In those days the pedestrians were the upper class and cart drivers the lower, the opposite of today's common perception.
 
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randyrippley

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there is of course another spoiler to the story: the Roman army didn't use chariots!
They were raced in the arena, but fighting was done by infantry and cavalry
 
Mcr Warrior

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Is it coincidence that Brunel's 7ft 0in gauge was exactly 50% wider than 4ft 8in gauge?
 
pdeaves

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Mcr Warrior said:
Is it coincidence that Brunel's 7ft 0in gauge was exactly 50% wider than 4ft 8in gauge?
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I read a quote somewhere (unknown if genuine or not) where Mr Brunel declared that he would, effectively, go 50% better than Mr Stephenson. It's the sort of thing he would have done, even if it's not actually true!
 
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