Is there any value anymore in old narrow guage rail? Could someone tell me the approximate date it was first used? Thanks

-- Carlton Pope (dpope@amaze.net), December 07, 1999

Answers

When was narrow gauge rail first used? That begs the question, "What is narrow gauge rail?", since "narrow gauge" is defined by the space between the rails, not the rails themselves. Narrow gauge railroads may have used 30 or 40 lb rail, but so did standard gauge railroads. Or, how about the fact that, until the 1870's, most railroads in the South were 5ft gauge, while those in the North were 4ft 8 1/2in gauge. Where the Northern roads "narrow gauge"? They were compared to the Erie R.R. of the time, which was 6ft gauge. The first popularly accepted instance of what we would think of as narrow gauge (i.e. less than 4ft 8 1/2in) was the Festiniog Railway, a 2ft gauge slate hauler on the west coast of Wales in Britain. That a working railroad could be run on that gauge led to the Maine Two Footers, the great Colorado 3ft network and the 3ft gauge link-up from Ohio to Texas. The Festiniog opened in September 1869. Narrowq gauge spread around the world in many guises.

-- Tom Underwood (tlunder@attglobal.net), April 27, 2000.

Carlton I have discovered that anything and everything has value when listed on E-Bay. A short time ago someone was selling RR spikes. And then last fall, if you had an extra $200,000 you could bid on acquiring a complete plantation narrow gauge system, including two locomotives, that someone had recovered from LA and hauled off to TX.

-- Joe Bartolini (jbart@physics.scsu.edu), April 26, 2000.