Causes For The Difference From International Standard Gauge
A commonly cited reason for the adoption of this gauge, broader than which became the international standard, is that it was intended to hinder any use of the railroad in any of French invasion attempts. This is possible, but the January 19, 1845 governmental decree does not state any reason, simply the gauge itself. It is known that the government entrusted such decisions to a committee, whose main work was done by civil engineers Juan Subercase and Calixto Santa Cruz: both good civil engineers but with little experience in railroads. Their judgement, made because of their profession and lack of experience in railroads, was that since the Spanish landscape was more mountainous than that of England and the France, a wider gauge would make more powerful locomotives possible, with larger boilers and, more importantly, larger fireboxes. This was obviously a miscalculation; in other areas of Spain, narrower gauges were used in the most mountainous areas, since Iberian gauge works in such areas was too expensive. One example of this is the 1,000 mm (3 ft 3 3⁄8 in) gauge FEVE.
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