History's Lessons Lost

Once upon a time (it was 1833), an engineer with the epic name of Isambard Kingdom Brunel was hired to build a railway. The railway was going to go from London to Bristol, but being the type of person to live up to his name's epicity, Isambard (can I call him Isy? no?) decided it wasn't epic enough, and had to go all the way to New York (except by then it was actually a boat). Even that wasn't epic enough, and so the Great Western Railway was built to a gauge of 7' 1/4", instead of George Stephenson's more common "coal gauge" of 4' 8 1/2". The reasoning was that the wider gauge would make for more stabe trains, allowing them to travel much faster than previously thought possible. Even the promise of epic speeds was not enough, and Isambard decided that to make things really epic he needed some truely inovative locomotives. They had names like Hurricane and Viper and had wheels ten feet high and had geared speed reduction at a time when gears were mostly found in clocks. They were all terrible. After spending too many late nights keeping the shambling wrecks on the rails, Brunel's deputy went over his head, and had the company directors appoint him superintentant of locomotives, allowing him to create a set of standard designs with a high number of components common to all the locomotives in the fleet.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel, shown with his characteristic stove pipe hat, gag cigar, higher-than-thou pants, and gigantic chains

(uselessness not pictured)

Meanwhile, pretty much evryone else had caught the railway mania, and lines were pushed ahead all over the place. The problem was that Brunel's choice of a different gauge to that of Stephenson had forced everyone else choose too. In 1845 a Royal commision was formed to decide on a standard gauge for the country, and settled on 4' 8 1/2", which was used by most other countries in the Northern hemisphere, and had by then was called the 'standard gauge' by almost everyone (and still is, by the way).
So eventually, all the experimental apects of the Great Western Railway were eliminated, since the ability to connect with the other railways around it and use well known common machinery was more profitable, whether the standards they used gave the best performance or not*.
This a trueism that has been demonstrated time and time again on railways around the world for the last 200 years (I'll be explaining why in a later post). Unfortunately, it has to be re-learnt every few years or so. At the moment the Iemma government wants to construct an East-West Metro to serve the rapidly growing outer suburbs of Sydney. Granted, a Metro offers cheaper construction (it only has single deck carriages), its lighter, and its quicker for passengers to get on and off. But it is also totally different to every other public transport system in Sydney, so while Metro trains might be able to run on the existing network, it will never be completely compatible, and will thus will never be part of an "integrated transport solution" that everybody wants to talk about. Neither will the existing monorail and light rail, which have so far gone either in circles or out to a park.
Ultimately, any technology needs to be considered in the context of the world around it, rather than in the confines of the feasability study. Lets hope that the folks in charge of Sydney's brand new trains get up and take a look outside.


*as it turns out, a wider gauge didn't offer that much greater stability, but did prevent the use of tight curvature. Likewise, all of Brunels original locomotoves were technological dead ends.