This past Sunday was one of those magnificent perfect Durban days when the sky is bluer than a Disney animation. I was walking along the Esplanade on the harbour side of the railway tracks from Wilson’s Wharf to the yacht mole.
The railway tracks had caught my eye earlier as I drove through Maydon Wharf. Those tracks are predominantly rusted and overgrown telling a story of bygone days when shunting moved the nations goods.
The year 1860 is well-known by South Africans of Indian origin as the year when most of our ancestors arrived on these shores. What’s less celebrated is that 1860 also saw the country’s first railway coming into operation on 26 June when the Natal Railway Company began operating between Market Square and Point station.
The Natal Railway’s initial rolling stock consisted of six wagons, two travelling cranes and one passenger coach. By January 1867 the line had been extended a further 5 km to Umgeni, from where stone, quarried from the Umgeni River, was transported to the harbour. The Natal remained in service for 15 years until the government converted the track from standard gauge to Cape gauge.
(Thanks to Hart’s SA Railways Historical Survey published in 1978 for this information.)
For those reading this who are not rail aficionados, gauge is simply the width of the rail tracks. Cape gauge, which is used throughout southern Africa, New Zealand, and Japan, is 1,067 metres. Most railway tracks around the world are standard gauge which is 1,435 metres (4 feet 8,5 inches) wide.
Now if you think about it, that’s an extremely odd number. Why is that gauge used? A friend and fellow collector of trivia said it was because that’s the way they built them in England, and the most railroads around the world were built by English expats.
Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.
Why did they use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools as they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
So why did the wagons use that wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that’s the spacing of the ruts.
So who built these old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of breaking their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made by or for Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing (ruts again).
Thus we have the answer to the original question. The international standard railroad gauge of 4ft 8.5in derives from the original military specification for a Roman army war chariot.
Another friend added: “I showed this to my wife, medieval studies major and horsewoman, who points out that the spacing of wheels on the Roman chariot was like as not dictated by the width of the yoke that attached the chariot to the horse, and the need to keep the wheel ruts well out of the path of the loose earth the hooves are kicking up.
“Thus, the gauge of the Iron Horse might be in fact derived from the width of the standard Roman war horse.”
We’ve come full circle in this country. 150 years after Natal in 1860, Gautrain launched with standard gauge. Welcome back to the future.