Cape Track
A cape gauge is a narrow gauge of railroad tracks in which the distance between the inside of the rail head is 3½ feet or 42 inches , which corresponds to 1067 millimeters. The original name was CAP-Spur after the initials of the Norwegian Carl Abraham Pihl , who first used it on a larger scale, and is not causally related to the Cape region in South Africa , even if a lot of railways were built there in this gauge (especially because of the Hex River tunnel ).
history
Lines with a 42 inch gauge already existed in the early days of the railroad, but were limited to short horse and mine railways.
The first railway in Kapspur built by Carl Abraham Pihl was the Hamar – Grundsetbanen line in Norway , which opened on June 23, 1862 . The executing railway engineer Pihl had recognized that opening up the mountainous and sparsely populated country with standard-gauge railways was unprofitable, and used a narrower gauge as a basis, which enabled better adaptation to the terrain. In connection with a lightweight construction, the construction costs were 25% lower than for standard gauge. By 1880, a total of 970 kilometers of Cape gauge railways had been built in Norway. With the exception of one branch line, all of these lines were converted to standard gauge between 1904 and 1949 . Outside Norway, the Cape Gauge was only used sporadically in Europe, for example in southern Sweden , on small railways in Russia and on various steam trams in the Netherlands .
Modern use
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- Today the Cape Trail is common in southern Africa , including South Africa , Angola , Botswana , DR Congo , Lesotho , Mozambique , Namibia , Zambia , Zimbabwe and Swaziland . It extends to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania ( TAZARA ).
→ See section Africa in the article Narrow Gauge Railway
- In Asia , the Cape Gauge can be found in Japan (with the exception of the high-speed lines , which were built in standard gauge ), in Taiwan (with the exception of the high-speed line and the MRT in Taipei and Kaohsiung , which were built in standard gauge) and in Indonesia . In Hong Kong it is used by the tram . The railway on the island of Sakhalin was the 20th century umgespurt beginning of 600 mm Cape gauge; in the course of the connection of the island network to the Russian rail network through the Sakhalin tunnel , which is still to be built, it is to be switched to the Russian broad gauge .
→ See sections Japan , Other Countries and Russia in the article Narrow Gauge Railway
- In Australian rail traffic , the Cape Gauge is common in the states of Queensland , Western Australia , and Tasmania as well as in neighboring New Zealand .
→ See section Australia and Oceania in the article Narrow Gauge Railway
- On the American continent, trains of this gauge run in Ecuador . Some trams, including the famous cable cars in San Francisco , are operated in Cape gauge.
→ See section America in the article Narrow Gauge Railway
use
Due to the curve radii that depend on the gauge , railways equipped with cape gauge can better adapt to the terrain, so that such routes are more economical to build than standard gauge lines .
The performance of the Cape gauge corresponds roughly to that of the meter gauge . In the case of narrow gauges, the advantage of lower construction costs is in principle bought at the expense of somewhat lower axle loads and lower vehicle stability against tipping. This means that there are also limits to the Cape gauge in heavy and high-speed traffic. In comparison with European narrow-gauge railways, however, many railway companies in Japan and southern Africa achieve astonishing performance on Cape Gauge. In Japan, Australia and South Africa, for example, passenger trains travel on Cape Gauge at speeds of up to 160 km / h. If you consider that 30 t axle load is the rule on standard-gauge tracks in North America and that up to 35 t axle load is sometimes used on works railways, it becomes clear that the European standard of 22.5 t axle load also on cap and meter gauge routes technically means no limit. In some cases, heavier freight trains are therefore common there than on the European standard-gauge railways, and accordingly powerful locomotives are available.
A special vehicle adaptation to the Cape gauge (and other narrow gauges) were the Garratt steam locomotives , which were widespread throughout southern Africa and South America . This design made it possible to keep the center of gravity of the locomotives low, even with a large boiler, which is all the more important, the narrower the gauge, because of the risk of tipping over.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Trond Bergh: Norwegian railway engineers and the narrow gauge ( Memento of the original from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ George Woodman Hilton: American Narrow Gauge Railroads . Stanford University Press, Stanford, California 1990, ISBN 0-8047-1731-1 , pp. 10 (English, 580 p., Limited preview in Google book search).
