From Invention and Technology: One Gauge: How Hundreds Of Incompatible Railroads Became A National System

A story about how all railroads in the US began to use a stardard gauge.

Without it, interstate commerce was suppressed.

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As early as 1847 Daniel Webster could say without sounding ludicrous that the railroad “towers above all other inventions of this or the preceding age.” Indeed, by the 1860s American railroads had triumphed over competing forms of transport for most long-distance travel. Shippers welcomed the dependability of year-round rail service. It was cheaper than the turnpike, more flexible and direct than the canal packet or the steamboat, and much faster than any of these.

During the 1850s and 1860s rail mileage expanded so rapidly that it seemed every little valley could afford a branch line. In 1869, with the Golden Spike hammered home at Promontory, Utah, coast-to-coast rail travel became possible for the first time. But American railways still had big problems to correct before they could form a unified national transportation network, and the most urgent of these was the fact that the hundreds of lines proliferating across the country had no common gauge. . . .

- Track gauge in the United States.

- Pacific Railroad Acts.