Carl Abraham Pihl
Carl Abraham Pihl (born January 16, 1825 in Stavanger , † September 14, 1897 in Christiania ) was Norway's leading railroad engineer in the second half of the 19th century .
Life
Pihl studied engineering at the Chalmers Institute in Gothenburg and went to England in the 1840s. There he did an internship with Robert Stephenson and later worked for Peter Bruff on a railway project in the east of England. In 1850 he returned to Norway and worked on the construction of the Norwegian main line ( Norsk Hoved-Jernbane ) from Christiania (now Oslo ) to Eidsvoll , which was built with British capital and under British leadership. After the railway opened in 1854, he stayed in England again, where he worked on various railway and port projects, mainly in Wales.
Because of the Crimean War , he finally returned to his native country in 1856, where he was appointed chief engineer for railway construction. The construction of the main line had shown that in view of the difficult topographical conditions and the sparse population in the country, opening up with standard-gauge railways according to European standards could not be financed. Pihl went on study trips to Austria and Germany and suggested building the new railways with a gauge of 3½ English feet or 42 English inches . At the time he was the only Norwegian engineer with expertise in railway construction and so his proposal was implemented.
The section from Hamar via Elverum to the Grundset six kilometers to the north was opened on June 23, 1862 as the Hamar Grundsetbanen as the first railway under Pihl's direction and as the world's first railway in the new gauge. A second narrow-gauge rail link on the route from Trondheim to Støren went into operation on August 5, 1864. The expectations for the railway were fulfilled, and so - with the exception of the lines leading to Sweden - all Norwegian main lines were built according to this system up to the turn of the century.
The track width specified by Pihl, which is converted to 1067 mm, was initially referred to as “CAP track” after his initials, later due to the linguistic similarity and the frequent use in the South African Cape Province in Germany in the spelling “ Kapspur ”, im English - but rarely used there - converted to “cape gauge”.
In 1883 Pihl became the first director of the newly established Norges Statsbaner . He remained an advocate of the narrow-gauge railway in Norway, out of “ the absolute conviction that those days will never come, as far as we can foresee, when our rail traffic will reach a type and extent that makes the standard gauge better or cheaper than the narrow gauge will ".
It was not until after his death that the realization prevailed that the narrow-gauge railways would not be able to cope with the meanwhile strong increase in traffic in the long term, and as early as 1898 the Norwegian parliament decided to build the Bergen Railway with standard-gauge. By 1949, all main lines in Norway had been converted to standard gauge .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ George Woodman Hilton: American narrow gauge railroads . Stanford University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-8047-1731-1 , pp. 10 (English).
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Pihl, Carl Abraham |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Norwegian railway engineer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 16, 1825 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Stavanger |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 14, 1897 |
| Place of death | Oslo |