Why British Trains Are the Smallest in the World

Get on a train in Britain and get on a train in Germany and you will feel it straight away. The German one is bigger. Taller inside, wider, roomier. The British one feels like it was built for smaller people, and in a way it was. Britain, the country that invented the railway and gave trains to the entire planet, runs some of the smallest trains in the developed world. And the reason why is one of the great ironies in all of engineering. Britain's trains are small precisely because Britain was first. In this video we clear up the one thing everybody gets wrong. This is not about the track gauge, the distance between the rails. Britain's track gauge is exactly the same as Germany's, France's, most of America's, and about sixty percent of the world's railways, the four feet eight and a half inches George Stephenson borrowed from the coal wagonways of northern England. The real difference is the loading gauge, the invisible envelope of space a train must fit through, set by the height of every bridge and the width of every tunnel. And Britain's is the most restrictive of any major railway on earth. We explain the beautiful irony of how the pioneer got trapped. When British engineers dug the first tunnels in the 1830s, nobody knew how big trains would become, so they built them small, and the whole nation got locked inside that head start. We cover Isambard Kingdom Brunel's brilliant seven foot broad gauge, better by every measure, and how Parliament killed it in the 1846 Gauge Act anyway. We get into the last broad gauge being ripped up over a single weekend in 1892, the doomed 1949 Bulleid double decker experiment, and why Britain still cannot run the double decker trains the rest of Europe takes for granted. The country that gave railways to the world built its own too small to ever grow. If you know British rail, the comments are for you. Which Victorian tunnel would you rebuild first? #RailwayHistory #BritishRail #Trains #Brunel #LoadingGauge #GreatWesternRailway #TrainHistory #UKRailways #Beeching