A narrow-gauge railway is a railway with a track gauge narrower than 1,435 mmstandard gauge. Most narrow-gauge railways are between 600 mm and 1,067 mm.
The Bridgton and Saco River Railroad (B&SR) was a 2 ft narrow gauge railroad that operated in the vicinity of Bridgton and Harrison, Maine. It connected with the Portland and Ogdensburg Railroad from Portland, Maine, to St. Johnsbury, Vermont, near the town of Hiram on the Saco River.
The Great Western Railway was a railway that operated in Canada West, today's province of Ontario, Canada. It was the first railway chartered in the province, receiving its original charter as the London and Gore Railroad on March 6, 1834, before receiving its final name when it was rechartered in 1845.
Railways with a track gauge of 3 ft 6 in were first constructed as horse-drawn wagonways. The first intercity passenger railway to use 3 ft 6 in was constructed in Norway by Carl Abraham Pihl. From the mid-nineteenth century, the 3 ft 6 in gauge became widespread in the British Empire. In Africa it became known as the Cape gauge as it was adopted as the standard gauge for the Cape Government Railways in 1873, although it had already been established in Australia and New Zealand before that. It was adopted as a standard in New Zealand, South Africa, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Queensland in Australia.
The Midland Railway of Canada was a historical Canadian railway which ran from Port Hope, Ontario to Midland on Georgian Bay. The line was originally intended to run to Peterborough, but the competing Cobourg and Peterborough Railway was completed in 1854 and the owner's plans changed. Redirecting the line northward, it opened as the Port Hope, Lindsay & Beaverton Railway, a much longer line than originally planned. A further expansion launched in 1869 pushed the line westward towards Georgian Bay, and prompted renaming as the Midland Railway.
Carl Abraham Pihl was a Norwegian civil engineer and director of the Norwegian State Railways (NSB) from 1865 until his death. Pihl was one of the main architects of the use of narrow-gauge railways in Norway.
Although most railways of central and eastern Canada were initially built to a 5 ft 6 in broad gauge, there were several, especially in Atlantic Canada and Ontario, which were built as individual narrow-gauge lines. These were generally less expensive to build, but were more vulnerable to frost heaving because vertical displacement of one rail caused greater angular deflection of the narrower two-rail running surface. Most of the longer examples were regauged starting in the 1880s as the railway network began to be bought up by larger companies.
Standard gauge was favored for railway construction in the United States, although a fairly large narrow-gauge system developed in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and Utah. Isolated narrow-gauge lines were built in many areas to minimize construction costs for industrial transport or resort access, and some of these lines offered common carrier service. Outside Colorado, these isolated lines evolved into regional narrow-gauge systems in Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Hawaii, and Alaska.
The Toronto, Grey and Bruce Railway (TG&B) was a railway company which operated in Ontario, Canada in the years immediately following the Canadian Confederation of 1867. It connected two rural counties, Grey County and Bruce County, with the provincial capital of Toronto to the east.
The Toronto and Nipissing Railway (T&N) was the first public narrow-gauge railway in North America. It chartered in 1868 to build from Toronto to Lake Nipissing in Ontario, Canada, via York, Ontario, and Victoria counties. At Nipissing it would meet the transcontinental lines of the Canadian Pacific, providing a valuable link to Toronto. It opened in 1871, with service between Scarborough and Uxbridge. By December 1872 it was extended to Coboconk, but financial difficulties led to plans of the line being built further abandoned at this point. The railway merged with the Midland Railway of Canada in 1882.
5 ft 6 in / 1,676 mm is a broad track gauge, used in India, Pakistan, western Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Argentina, Chile, and on BART in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Originally, various track gauges were used in the United States. Some railways, primarily in the northeast, used standard gauge of 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in ; others used gauges ranging from 2 ft to 6 ft. As a general rule, southern railroads were built to one or another broad gauge, mostly 5 ft, while northern railroads that were not standard-gauge tended to be narrow-gauge. The Pacific Railroad Acts of 1863 specified standard gauge.
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