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The Question of a Standard Gauge for Russian Railways, 1836-1860

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

R. M. Haywood
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Notes and Comment
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Slavic Review , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , March 1969 , pp. 72 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1969

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References

1. George Stephenson originally had used the gauge of 4 feet 8½ inches for his colliery railways in the north of England simply because it was the distance between the wheels of the ordinary road carts that he converted for use on these railways. Later, anticipating the extension of railways throughout England and wishing to facilitate an unbroken communication between them, he insisted that the Stockton and Darlington Railway (1825) and the Liverpool-Manchester Railway (1830) also be built to that gauge. Smiles, Samuel, The Life of George Stephenson and of His Son Robert Stephenson (New York, 1868), p. 424n Google Scholar. At first most British railway builders and engineers were content to follow Stephenson's example. But Isambard Kingdom Brunei, who was chief engineer of the Great Western Railway, proposed in October 1835 to build this railway to a gauge of 7 feet. He thought it would allow for faster and more powerful locomotives and a greater capacity for the rolling stock and would provide greater stability and safety at high speeds. Brunei, Isambard, The Life of Isambard Kingdom Brunei: Civil Engineer (London, 1870), pp. 101–6 Google Scholar.

2. Warren, James H. G., A Century of Locomotive Building by Robert Stephetison and Co., 1823-1923 (Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1923), pp. 79, 93-94, 331 Google Scholar.

3. Even Brunei advised some Italian railway builders who consulted him that they should build to the gauge of 4 feet 8½ inches, not only because this would facilitate connection with other railways but also because he thought that railways outside of England would not have a great enough need for increased speed and capacity to justify his 7-foot gauge. Rolt, L. T. C., Isambard Kingdom Brunei (London, 1957), pp. 151–52 Google Scholar. Only railways in Spain and Portugal later used the broader gauge of 5 feet 6 inches— which isolated them from other European railway systems.

4. The governments of Belgium (May 1834) and France (June 1842), influenced by economic and military considerations, planned systems that would have several trunk railways meeting at a central point, to provide for the uninterrupted transfer of both passengers and freight between most major cities, ports, and frontiers. Lamalle, Ulysse, Histoire des chemins de fer beiges (Brussels, 1953), p. 26 Google Scholar; Ernest-Charles, Jean, LeS Chemins de fer en France pendant le regne de Louis-Philippe (Paris, 1896), pp. 106–8 Google Scholar.

5. See, for example, American Railroad Journal and Mechanics’ Magazine, June 1, 1839, pp. 321-25.

6. Taylor, George R. and Neu, Irene D., The American Railroad Network, 1861- 1890 (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), pp. 12–14 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Before 1835 in Russia there were two short railways that carried ore from mines to nearby factories, but they were located in remote areas and did not attract the serious attention of the government in St. Petersburg. The first railway, using horse traction, was built by the Oberbergmeister P. K. Frolov in 1806-9 at the state-owned Kolyvano-Voskresenskie factories in the Altai Mountains. Its gauge was 3 feet 6 inches. Virginsky, V. S., Zamechatel'nye russkie izobretateli Frolovy (Moscow, 1952), p. 126 Google Scholar. The second railway was built in 1835-36 at Nizhnii Tagil in the Urals by the serf mechanic M. E. Cherepanov, who also built two small steam locomotives—the first in Russia—for use on the railway. Cherepanov chose a much broader gauge of 5 feet 4I/2 inches. Boiko, F. I., Zamechatel'nye russkie mekhaniki Cherepanovy (Sverdlovsk, 1952), p. 42 Google Scholar. In both cases the builders apparently chose a gauge for their railways arbitrarily and without following the example of any foreign railway builder.

8. For the Linz-Budweis Railway, which used horse traction, von Gerstner had used the gauge of 4 feet 8½ inches, after inspecting George Stephenson's railways in the north of England in 1822. Huyer, R,“Die Budweis-Linzer Pferdeeisenbahn,” Mittheilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Deutschen in Böhmen, 31 (1893): 90 Google Scholar.

9. von Gerstner, Franz Anton, Pervyi otchet ob uspekhakh zheleznoi dorogi is Sanktpeterburga v Tsarskoe Selo i Pavlovsk (St. Petersburg, 1836), pp. 5–6 Google Scholar.

10. Ibid., pp. 7-8.

11. For example, at the official opening of the Tsarskoe Selo Railway on October 30, 1837, one of the locomotives built by Robert Stephenson and Company pulled a train of eight loaded carriages over the fourteen and a third miles between Tsarskoe Selo and St. Petersburg in twenty-seven minutes, attaining speeds up to 40 mph. Severnaia pchela (St. Petersburg), Nov. 2, 1837, p. 991; von Gerstner, Franz Anton, Bericht über den Stand der Unternehmung der Eisenbahn von St. Petersburg nach Zarskoe-Selo und Pawlowsk (Leipzig, 1838), p. xviii Google Scholar.

12. The performance of the broad-gauge locomotives on the Great Western Railway was also not markedly superior to that of narrow-gauge locomotives until 1840, when Brunei's assistant Daniel Gooch built the first of his“Firefly” class locomotives, which had a larger firebox and boiler and driving wheels seven feet in diameter. This locomotive could maintain an average speed of SO mph over a distance of more than thirty miles, which was at the time an accomplishment without precedent. Rolt, , Isambard Kingdom Brunei, p. 131 Google Scholar.

13. von Gerstner, Franz Anton, Berichte aus den Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika iiber Eisenbahnen, Dampjschiffahrten, Banken und andere offentliche Unternehmungen (Leipzig, 1839), p. 64 Google Scholar. The Tsarskoe Selo Railway was the only railway in Russia ever built to the 6-foot gauge. It was finally converted to a gauge of 5 feet in 1902, when it was made a part of the railway then being built from St. Petersburg to Vitebsk. Sokolov, A. I., Nakanune 100-letiia: Pervaia russkaia zheleznaxa doroga v proshlom (Leningrad, 1925), p. 33 Google Scholar.

14. The Warsaw-Vienna Railway, authorized in January 1839 and built first by a private company and later by the state, was completed in April 1848. It was 192 miles long and ran south from Warsaw to the Austrian border. A short branch was also built from the main line westward to the town of Lowicz. Verkhovsky, V. M., Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk nachala i rasprostraneniia zheleznykh dorog v Rossii po 1897 g. vkliuchitel'no (St. Petersburg, 1898), p. 52 Google Scholar.

15. Shcherbatov, A. P., General-Fel'dmarshal kniaz’ Paskevich: Ego zhizn’ % deiateVnosf (St. Petersburg, 1888-1904), 5, pt. 1: 189–91Google Scholar.

16. Blum, Jerome,“Transportation and Industry in Austria, 1815-1848,” Journal of Modern History, 15 (1943): 31 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. Matthesius, Oscar, Russische Eisenbahnpolitik im XIX. Jahrhundert, 1836-1881 (inaugural dissertation, Berlin, 1903), p. 19, n. 2 Google Scholar.

18. The St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway, authorized in January 1842 and built by the state, was completed in November 1851. It ran between St. Petersburg and Moscow in a nearly straight line, 403 miles long. Sbornik svedenii o zhelesnykh dorogakh v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1867), 1: 87-88.

19. See“Donesenie Nikolaiu I komissii po ustroistvu zheleznoi dorogi mezhdu Peterburgom i Moskvoi, 15 sentiabria 1841 g.,” Krasnyi arkhiv, 76 (1936): 140-44.

20. Melnikov, after consulting with several engineers on his trip to America, had come to the conclusion that this gauge would incorporate the best features of gauges both broader and narrower. Melnikov, P. P.,“Opisanie v tekhnicheskom otnoshenii zheleznykh dorog severo-amerikanskikh shtatov,” Zhurnal putei soobshcheniia, 1842, vol. 2, bk. 1, pp. 66–70 Google Scholar.

21. Major Whistler, who was the father of the famous painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler, had been in charge of the construction of the Western Railway (now the Penn Central), which was being built westward from Boston to Albany. Colonel Melnikov had met him in 1840 in Springfield, Massachusetts, and had been very much impressed by Whistler's ability and knowledge of railways. Later he suggested to his superiors that Whistler be invited to come to Russia as consulting engineer. Vose, George L., The Life and Works of George Washington Whistler (Boston, 1887), pp. 28–29 Google Scholar.

22. New York Public Library, Manuscript Division,“Report of George Washington Whistler to His Excellency Count Kleinmichel on the Gauge of the Russian Railways,“ Sept. 9, 1842, pp. 2-4.

23. Kislinsky, N. A., Nasha zheleznodorozhnaia politika po dokumentam arkhiva Komiteta Ministrov (St. Petersburg, 1902), 1: 30 Google Scholar.

24. See, for example, Brown, Robert R.,“Gauges—Standard and Otherwise,” The Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, Bulletin no. 88 (May 1953), p. 83 Google ScholarPubMed.

25. Iazykov, P. A.,“O dorogakh sostavliaiushchikh strategicheskie linii,” Zhurnal putei soobshcheniia, 1841, vol. 2, bk. 3, p. 154 Google Scholar.

26. “Report of George Washington Whistler,” p. 5. Whistler may have been at least partly influenced in his decision by the example of the Charleston and Hamburg Railroad in South Carolina, which had been opened in 1833 and was the first railway ever built to the 5-foot gauge. Philips, Ulrich B., A History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt to 1860 (New York, 1908), p. 1908 Google Scholar. Other railway builders followed the lead of the Charleston and Hamburg Railroad, which was the earliest railway of importance in the American South. By the Civil War the 5-foot gauge was by far the most usual in all states of the Confederacy east of the Mississippi River, except North Carolina and Virginia. Black, Robert C., The Railroads of the Confederacy (Chapel Hill, 1952), pp. 9–10 Google Scholar. It was not until 1886 that all the major railways in the South, in order to connect with Northern railways, were converted to 4 feet 8½ inches, which was henceforth to be the standard gauge throughout the United States. Neu, Taylor and, American Railroad Network, pp. 79–81 Google Scholar.

27. Polnoe sobranie zakonov rossiiskoi imperii, 2nd ser., vol. 32, no. 31, 448 (Jan. 26, 1857), pp. 74-75.

28. Sbornik svedenii o zheleznykh dorogakh v Rossii, 3: 350. There were still to be some exceptions to this rule for railways in the kingdom of Poland west of the Vistula River cbnnecting with the Warsaw-Vienna Railway or with Austrian and Prussian railways. Thus the branches of the Warsaw-Vienna Railway via Lowicz to the Prussian border near Bromberg (completed in 1863) and to the industrial city of Lodz (completed in 1866) were to be built to the gauge of 4 feet 8½ inches. But by the late 1860s the Russian government had decided that no more railways of this gauge were to be built, since they were actually an extension of the Austrian and Prussian railway systems. Ibid., 1: 115-17, 188. After 1870, when narrow-gauge railways began to be built abroad, the Russian government allowed a few short railways of local significance to be built to the gauges of 3 feet or 3 feet 6 inches to serve as feeder lines for normal-gauge railways. Westwood, J. N., A History of Russian Railways (London, 1964), pp. 62, 305Google Scholar.

29. In Prussia the first important legislation regulating railway construction (November 1838) stipulated that railways meeting at a given point were to be built to join with each other and to specifications similar enough to allow an uninterrupted interchange of passengers and freight. Gesetz-Sammlung für die Königlichen Preussischen Staaten, vol. 38, no. 1, 947 (Nov. 3, 1838), p. 515. In July 1843 a treaty between Prussia and Saxony specifically stated that railways linking the two states should be built to a gauge of 4 feet 8½ inches, since all other railways in both countries were of that gauge. Ibid., vol. 43, no. 2, 400 (July 24, 1843), p. 404.

Events followed somewhat the same course in Austria. In December 1841 the Austrian government decreed that an integrated system of four trunk railway lines, built around the Kaiser Ferdinands-Nordbahn and connecting the most important parts of Cisleithanian Austria, would be built at the expense of the state. Geschichte der Eisenbahnen der Österreichisch-ungarischen Monarchie (Vienna, 1898), 1: 195-98. These new railways were to have the same gauge as the Kaiser Ferdinands-Nordbahn. By the early 1850s treaties establishing international railway connections between Austria and such neighboring German states as Bavaria stated that this gauge of 4 feet 8½ inches was to be adopted, so that rolling stock could be used on all the railways of both countries. Recueil des traités et conventions conclus par I'Autriche avec les puissances étrangirés, depuis 1763 jusqu'á nos jours, ed. L. Neumann (Leipzig, 1859), vol. 5, no. 532 (June 21, 1851), p. 343.

30. PSZ, 2nd ser., vol. 32, no. 32, 015 (June 21, 1857), p. 560.