A Four-Foot Eight and a Half Inch Lesson

Hello again, this is Dick Footh with Footh and Friends, and we are literally on the road. You say what's that sort of racket in the background? The squeaks and the sort of clackity clack. Well, that's a train. Travel for hundreds of years was on foot, sometimes donkey or horse or camel. Interestingly enough, that was camel train. But, or if you were handable at war with elephants, then the railroads came. On February 21st, 1804, British mining engineer and veteran explorer Richard Trevathick debuted the first full-scale working railway steam locomotive in a Welsh mining town. And that over the years was followed by all kinds of locomotives that have been powered by a myriad of fuels and wood, coal, oil, all of that. 1913, diesel came alive. It's getting loud, isn't it? We're going over bridge. In 1913, diesel powered locomotives at the same station. That will be Mobs Pleasant, Iowa. If this is just that, please don't gather your personal items. Walk toward the very center of your car and down the stairs to the train. Diner won't you blow. Diner won't you blow. Diner won't you blow your horn. Diner won't you blow. Diner won't you blow. Diner won't you blow your horn. Did I happen to mention that we're on Amtrak's California Zephyr from Denver, Chicago. We are rolling out through the countryside of Iowa and we're about to come to Mount Pleasant. If you should so choose to go there. It's fun looking out at cornfields on this Sunday, October the second. Some of them have been harvested some not. In some of these little towns, we roll within, I don't know, a hundred feet of somebody's backyard. And it's just fun. You hear the sound of the whistle that carries in itself some interesting memories for me. I really like trains. In 1945, my folks when I was three and a half put us on the Union Pacific from California to New York City. We're on our way to India after the Second World War. In the fall of that year, we finally got to Bombay and we got on a British Indian railway from Bombay to Madras, now Chennai. A year later, I'm on a little cog railway called the Blue Mountain Express narrow gauge. And it has a piece in the middle that catches in a cog system that allows you to go up steep inclines. And I would use that train to go to our school up in the Nilgar Hills of South India. Trains, at least for my age group or even now, are fun for little kids. I mean, some of us remember the little engine that could that story or how about a talking train, like a talking train engine. About the time we were going to India, the Thomas the Tank Engine Universe was the brainchild of an Anglican minister, Reverend Wilbert Audrey, who in 1942 began spinning stories about trains to amuse his son Christopher, who had come down with the measles. The first volume in Audrey's The Railway series was published in 1945. He wrote 26 more books, the last one in 1972. After his father's death, Christopher, his son wrote 16 more. I remember watching a lot of Thomas the Tank Train adventures with grandchildren back in the day. So here we are, and usually we don't have quite this much racket. I'm usually in a studio or on my back porch or somewhere. But I kind of like the thought of doing this death for this one time. I mean, we are literally rocking and rolling across Iowa. Just recently, just a few minutes ago, I think maybe half an hour, we stopped at Otomo, Iowa. And through the window, I just took a picture I've never taken before of a train track just going off into the distance. Something very interesting about train tracks, and you might know this, is that the gauge of a railroad track, the standard gauge, that means distance between the rails is four feet, eight and a half inches. This is the gauge with which steam railroading began back in the early 1800s and became the common gauge of Britain and North American, Western Europe, except for Spain, Portugal and Ireland. But this is how that happened that the train tracks are that far apart. I mean, this four feet, eight inch platform, if you will, these tracks moves people across nations over rivers, down valleys through mountains across deserts. How did this sort of odd width become the standard? When George Stevenson, I'm reading this, when George Stevenson designed the Stockton and Darlington Railway in the North of England in 1825, he used a gauge of four feet, eight inches, simply because he'd been familiar with that on a mine tramway called the Willington Way and the Tyne River Bologna Castle. In turn, the Willington Way had been built to this gauge because it was common on roads in the area. After the Stockton and Darlington used the same four feet eight inches for the Liverpool and Manchester, the words first railway between major cities, he widened the gauge by half inch, probably to give it a little help. But at the outset, the choice of four feet eight and a half inches appeared arbitrary. But by the 1870s, archaeological excavations in Pompeii and elsewhere were revealing that the gauge Stevenson chose may have been the approximate gauge of Roman road vehicles. And by road vehicles, we're not, we're not talking cars or motorcycles or something. We're talking about Roman chariots. The famous episode of an American engineer, Walton Evans, thought he'd test this hypothesis. And so he checked the routes made by carts and chariots at Pompeii and converted the width into inches. And that's what it popped up. So the survival of this gauge for road vehicles in Western Europe, including Britain, was carried over into early railways. It probably represents, according to historians, the optimal size of a road vehicle relative to the indivisible size of a horse. I love this line. Anything less would have underutilized the horse and anything greater would have put excessive strain on the animal. So the fact that American trains in 2022 were sitting on tracks of four feet eight and a half inches. Is because Imperial Rome had chariots with that width between the wheels? Apparently. It's interesting, isn't it? That sometimes past decisions have lingering unintended effects that we accept without really questioning their genesis. How many of you have heard the phrase, well, we've never done it that way before. Or that's the way it's always been done. That's one approach to life, whole discoveries, whole inventions and systems have been created by challenging that phrase. But sometimes that phrase takes us back to a space that works. So in the, in the Garden of Eden, when God says, where are you? That's a perfectly good question for then and for now. I mean, God knew where Adam was. Adam didn't know where it was. That question, where are you? That's kind of like a four foot eight and a half inch question. I mean, what assumptions today in your space or your industry are determined by the acceptance of some historical question like that. And again, what I'm saying is some things stand and they're always done that way because it works. When Jesus asks the question, what so-let-profit a person, if they gain the whole world and lose their own souls, I'm going to stop right here and come back in a little bit. But let's just listen to the train rolling out of Mount Pleasant Island. So at this point, I want to make a segue. I'm going to fast forward 12 days, no longer on the train, standing adjacent a few hundred yards away from interstate 70 in Hays, Kansas. Well, that's a natural segue you say. It's the intervening 12 days since I recorded on the train, had been quite an adventure on the East Coast, but that is a story for another day. Let me leave you again with those two questions to ponder. So where are you? And the second one is, what shall it profit a person? If he or she gain the whole world, lose his own soul. As we sign off on this program, I just think it would be wonderful to hear some of that track music again, the rolling of wheels along steel ribbons around the world. And we'll sign off with that. This is Dick Foth saying, God bless you. Thanks for subscribing. Whatever platform you're on and we will catch you later. God bless. Bye. .