What are some of the more popular trolley gauges? How common is 5' 2"? The museum where I work has a horse car of that gauge, and it was last on rails around 1925. Thanks very much!

Joshua

Pennsylvania was mostly 5' 2.25". New Orleans used (still does, I think) this gauge as well. Baltimore used 5' 2.5". The purpose of the wider gauge was usually to keep freight trains off the streets, although the stated purpose in Baltimore was so wagons could use the rails too. Los Angeles had some narrow gauge cars, they were either 36" or 42", can't recall which. Most systems used standard gauge of 56.5", though.

The most popular gauge by far was standard gauge, of course; most streetcar lines and virtually all interurban lines were standard gauge. Many streetcar systems in Pennsylvania, including Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, used 5'2-1/2" gauge, which was known as "Pennsylvania gauge." New Orleans also used (and still uses) this wide gauge. Los Angeles, Denver and Portland, Oregon ran 3'6" gauge streetcars; St. Louis cars were 4'10" gauge; and Toronto streetcars were (and still are) 4'10-7/8" gauge. Baltimore streetcars were very wide gauge, 5'4-1/2". A few other systems like Savannah (5') and Columbus (5'2") used other miscellaneous odd gauges.

By far the most common gauge for trolleys was RR standard gauge.

PA trolley lines were mostly wide gauge with variations. Philadelphia (city tracks, ex-PRT) is 5' 2 1/4" while Red Arrow (P&WCT) and Pittsburgh are 5' 2 1/2. P&W is RR gauge. Most wide gauge companies were 5' 2 1/2" but Altoona was 5' 3" and NEPA lines (Allentown - Scranton - W-B) were RR gauge, as is L&WV.

Note that SEPTA inherited three gauges for its light rail.

Baltimore was 5' 4" BSM still is but new light rail is RR gauge.

Narrow gauge trolleys were generally 3' 6" and may have inherited infrastructure from cable lines. SF cable is 3' 6" but SF trolleys are RR gauge.

Of course, the reason some trolley lines were not standard gauge is that many were built before there was a standard gauge in the U.S. Northern railroads began to conform to standard gauge during the Civil War, and the remaining 5' gauge southern railroads changed on a single day in 1886.

Louisville's streetcar and interurban operation was mostly 5' gauge as account of the first horsecar service taking over the trackage of the uncompleted Lexington and Ohio railroad. The L&O built a section of track down the middle of Main St. in Louisville.

When the Louisville and Interurban built its small network of lines radiating from Louisville, they built them to 5', which wasn't good in terms of freight interchange with the steam railroads. They did operate one line shared with the L&N, necessitating dual gauge track in downtown Louisville, which later allowed the Interstate Service Company, later Indiana Railroad to operate through to downtown Louisville.

The Market-Frankford elevated is wide gauge, as well. This is why the old P&W has never been combined with the El -- one or the other would have to be regauged. The two lines also use different third rail systems, too -- the El has the shoe running under the third rail while the P&W has it on top. The Lindenwold line and the Broad Street Subway are both standard gauge and both use the same third rail system as the P&W.

I've heard many different claims about the differences between the Red Arrow trolley lines and the city lines -- slightly different gauges, different flanges, etc. I've never seen any difinitive proof that the Red Arrow and the city systems are, in fact, different. I *have* heard that Red Arrow wanted to use the El to access Center City at one point, but was kept out by the PRR. During my days at the Penn's Landing Trolley I made a bit of a study of this, but returning south sort of changed my focus.

Some trolleys are 3ft, the one in Whitehorse is; it came from Lisbon

One thing that has not yet been stated is that many of the broad-guage trolley lines were built that way because of local requirments. To get the franchise, or permission, to construct the streetcar line the local government required the broad gauge.

This was to keep the local streetcar company from hauling regular railroad freight cars through the city streets.

In the Los Angeles area many of the early horse car lines and cable car lines were built to 42" gauge. When they were electrified the track was not rebuilt so the streetcar lines kept the same 42" gauge. In fact, the early LA area interurbans were also built with the same 42" gauge -- in time, these were rebuilt to standard.

One LA area steam road, Los Angeles & Redondo, started out as 36" gauge. Then in the early 1900s it electrified and converted to 42" gauge to be able to operate all the way into downtown LA. With the 1910-11 consolidation of local and interurban lines this company was split with part of it going to the 42" gauge city system (Los Angeles Railway) and part going to the standard gauge Pacific Electric and was standard gauged.

Yes, a lot of franchise agreements were set up with requirements to forestall use of the street trackage for standard RR freight. But once the question of gauge was settled, there was a wide variation in wheel tread /flange profiles. So called 'streetcar wheels' often varied from the more or less railroad standard of 5 inch tread and 1 inch deep flange (nominal dimensions) to four inch tread or even three inch tread and with much lower flanges. The lower flanges would seem a problem but with the use of girder rail that was somewhat eliminated since both wheels could serve to help steer the car.

Other items in the track structure had to be customized to suit the chosen wheel profiles including back to back distance of guardrails, and any turnout or crossing frogs. These often were made with very shallow flangeways - so that a car with narrow wheel treads would not 'fall into' the gap in the rails at a frog and be supported across this gap by running on the flange.

A real headache for preservationists who often have to address these problems when trying to figure out how to operate a wide variety of cars on a single museum line.

Bob Kutella

Bob,

How does IRM operate the various street railway, rapid transit, and interurban equipment on the same line with little or no trouble? This was one of the things that amazed me when I visited.

Bob does make a good point, at the Museum of Transportation, the Trolley volunteers used trucks from a CTA 6000 series L car when they regauged the PTC PCC from broad gauge. The truck allowed quick conversion to standard gauge, and also has railroad standard flanges, so it could negotiate the track work at the museum with ease. It's probably going to be the same solution when we get around to the operational restoration of the St. Louis PCC car. We have to use wedges and blocks to get it through a switch frog.

Well, we have developed a more or less standard wheel gauge for equipment that operates 'regularly'. In the case of Chicago Surface Lines streetcars that has meant re-wheeling since the CSL relied on tram wheel profiles. Not a big deal if we want to run them since in many cases the existing wheels were 'used up' and needed replacing anyway. But changing the profile also means new profile brake shoes and sometimes modifying or adjusting the brake rigging and truck clearances.

Our operating Chicago PCC has resilient wheels so as they wear only the rim assemblies need be changed and any braking there is inboard in the truck.

Some cars have 'compromise' wheels being 4 inch tread and only slightly smaller flanges. (For example Milwaukee streetcars) As long as the back to back distance is within narrow limits these work ok.

When switching and occasionally moving cars with the narrow three inch wheels and small flanges, great care is exercised, and occasional use of a filler bar at frogs may be needed if a car is stubborn or there are several back and forth moves over the same track and turnout.

Most of the interurbans use standard tread and flange as they also developed and survived in part to interchange freight business - such as the North Shore, 'Roaring' Elgin, Illinois Terminal, South Shore, etc. Yea, even the lowly Sand Springs Ry survives today as a shortline.

All of the Chicago Rapid Transit equipment has always used standard wheel profiles.

All running on the same railroad - yes. But since they are trolleys, we have not discussed the height of the contact wire, tracking of poles through wire frogs with the cars having widely divergent length and geometry, the use of current collectors being either trolley wheels, steel insert sliding shoes, carbon insert sliding shoes, pans or bow collectors, - - -

You get the idea.

Bob Kutella

To continue the thread on Philadelphia gauges, here is the list:

System gauge profile
City trolley 62.25 trolley
Elevated (MFSE) 62.25 Railroad
Broad St. 56.5 RR (handles interchange)
Red Arrow (P&WCT) 62.5 compromise
P&W 56.5 RR (handled interchange)
PATCO 56.5 RR (handles interchange)

I'm told P&WCT cars could run on their own wheels from the Brill plant to P&WCT, until the 63rd and Market connection was severed. On the other hand, P&WCT car 73 was trucked to ex-PRT Callowhill Depot as part of the 1976 Bicentennial tourtram project but could not stay on the track there.

[I previously posted this on SubTalk. It
does cite a city with 5' 2" trolleys!]

Some places got wild in their lack of
standardization.

Trenton, New Jersey had 4 different trolley gauges at
once, with 2 different cases of dual gauge track.
Trenton & Mercer County Traction (Trenton Transit)
used an odd gauge of 5' 2". Public Service Railways
(Public Service Co-ordinated Transport) used Standard
Gauge of 4' 8-1/2" for their North Jersey lines and
an even 5' (the Russian and Confederate gauge) for
their South Jersey lines. The 2 groups used dual
gauge track to share a Trenton terminal.
Pennsylvania-New Jersey Railways (Bucks County
Traction and Trenton-Princeton Traction Company) used
Standard Gauge of 4' 8-1/2" for their intrastate line
to Princeton and the "Pennsylvania Broad Gauge" in
its Philadelphia variation of 5' 2-1/4" for their
interstate lines to Pennsylvania. They originally had
a stretch of single dual gauge track in the center of
the 2-lane street to reach the joint terminal. This
was later replaced by 2 single tracks, one for each
gauge, in the same 2-lane, 2-way street! While the 2
different companies' Standard Gauge lines didn't
correct directly, they both handled steam railroad
interchange freight traffic, and connected to the
national railroad system via 2 different railroads.

Cincinnati, Georgetown, & Portsmouth (Ohio) trolley
line had 3 gauges - standard, narrow, and
Cincinnati's broad trolley gauge, with some wild
triple-gauge track.
Louisville (Kentucky) Railways had 5' gauge city
trolleys, but had some dual gauge track with Indiana
Railroad interurbans. The IRR cars used the Big 4
(Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis) Railroad
bridge and tracks to cross the Ohio River, but LRy
trolleys on the suburban "Daisy Line" to Indiana
shared 4 rail gantlet track with steam trains on a
different railroad bridge.

Columbus, Ohio (and possibly Salt Lake City, Utah)
had 3-rail dual gauge trolley tracks, standard and
broad gauges.
San Francisco, California had some dual gauge track
to allow standard gauge trolley work cars to tow
cable cars on flat cars to the narrow gauge cable car
barn on a street that already had a cable car track.
The last traces of this track disappeared in the 1982
cable car system reconstruction.
Los Angeles, California trolleys were 3' 6" gauge
(because that was the gauge of the cable cars they
replaced!) There was some dual-gauge track with the
standard gauge Pacific Electric interurbans. Denver,
Colorado had the same 2 different gauges for similar
reasons, but I don't know about dual-gauge track.

Kutztown, Pennsylvania had some dual gauge standard
and Pennsylvania Broad gauge track, because the
Allentown & Reading interurban line used the gauges
of its terminal cities in the 2 ends of its line.
Kutztown carbarn was the meeting of the gauges.
Reading trolleys were broad gauge, Allentown's were
standard.

Suburban Toronto, Ontario briefly had some 4-rail
track when a "Radial" trolley line that handled
interchange steam railroad freight cars was converted
to the Toronto city gauge of 4' 10-7/8" (very close
to 1.5 metres!) before the freight service could be
abandoned!

Altoona, Pennsylvania trolleys were 5' 3" (the
Irish railway gauge!), Baltimore, Maryland was
5' 4", and Bay Area Rapid Transit in California
is 5' 6" (by coincidence the Spanish and
Portuguese railroad gauge). BART was
designed by a consultant!
The Irish railway (and probably tram) gauge was a
bureaucrat's compremise: he took the average of all
the competing proposals and issued a decree.
The modern just abandoned Detroit (Mich.) trolleys
were 9 decimeter gauge, because that was the gauge of
most of their used trolley cars, which came from
Lisbon, Portugal.
San Antonio (Tex.) used 4' gauge for passenger
trolleys (as found in some Welsh coal mines), but
standard gauge for the freight trolleys of the Texas
Transportation Co. I don't know if there was any
shared track.

The Interboro Rapid Transit was probably built
standard gauge to allow thru running on the Bronx
Els and the Long Island Rail Road.
Somewhere I read that the West Side & Yonkers
Patent Elevated Railway (the 1869 start of the
9th Ave. El) was 4' 9" gauge.
Dunkirk, New York passed a local law that no
railroad coming into town could have the same
gauge as any other line. The Erie was 6', the
New York Central was standard, and the Lake
Shore & Michigan Southern was 4' 10" gauge.

Bradford and Leeds England used 2 different tram
(streetcar) gauges - standard and 4', but had some
through running using cars with splined axles and
sliding wheels! Later, after through passenger
service stopped, that "S" shaped section of gauge
change track at the municipal boundary was used by
the freight trackless trolley's "skate" since there
wasn't a negative wire at that point. The former
tram companies' parcel delivery service outlasted the
through trams long enough to go trackless!