Rail Gauge
Track gauge is a technical term used in rail transport to define the spacing of the rails in an individual railway track.
All the vehicles operating over a network must have running gear that is compatible with the track gauge, and in the earliest days of railways, selection of a proposed railway's track gauge was a key issue.
As the dominant parameter determining interoperability, it is still frequently used as a descriptor of a route or network.
There is a distinction between the nominal track gauge of a network and the actual current track gauge at some locality, due to divergence of the track components from the nominal. Railway engineers use a device to measure the actual track gauge, and this device is also referred to (in another sense of the words) as a track gauge.
Read more about Rail Gauge: Nominal Track Gauge, Terminology, Maintenance Standards, Dominant Gauges, Future, Temporary Way - Permanent Way, Pioneers, See Also
Famous quotes containing the word rail:
“If goodness were only a theory, it were a pity it should be lost to the world. There are a number of things, the idea of which is a clear gain to the mind. Let people, for instance, rail at friendship, genius, freedom, as long as they will—the very names of these despised qualities are better than anything else that could be substituted for them, and embalm even the most envenomed satire against them.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)