Standard Railway
Dimensions and Clearances
Joyce's World of Transport Eclectica
This page links to a scanned image showing the dimensions for British standard gauge railway lines in the 1950s.
It was published by Her Majesty's Stationery Office as an appendix to the Requirements for Passenger Lines and Recommendations for Goods Lines of the Minister of Transport in regard to Railway Construction and Operation. This booklet was reprinted at intervals during the 1950s.
In order to maintain legibility, the scanned image has been uploaded as a fairly large .gif file of 136KB measuring 3000 by 2000 pixels. You will need to scroll around to view all of it but you should be able to read the detailed figures.
Note by the way that the dimensions are all given in feet and inches, not in metric units.
Go to the Structure Gauge Diagram.
If you want to see the modern equivalents, you can visit the Office of Rail Regulation's Railway safety principles and guidance site, or just download their Guidance on infrastructure (a pdf file, 692KB).
Note: the
pictures aren't linked back to this page so you'll need to use whatever passes for a BACK feature in your browser.
This information is posted for discussion purposes only. The information is historic and has been superseded by new standards which can be found in the Office of Rail Regulation's publication, Railway Safety Principles and Guidance, published by HSE Books.
It follows a number of threads in the Usenet newsgroup, uk.railway. It was transcribed and posted to the Web in April 2006 by the entity known as Joyce Whitchurch.
Comments on the text, or any broken links, are always welcome: mail me.
