The world’s railroads aren’t all the same, you know. Width of track, or _gauge_, varies. Standard gauge, as ’most everyone knows, is four-feet, eight-and-one-half inches between the rails and there are plenty of hypotheses about how it got that way. A few roads are wider than standard--five-feet, and five-and-a-half. Years ago you could even go all the way from New York to Chicago on tracks six feet wide. England once made merry on some _seven_ foot gauge. Narrower gauge was much more common. Three feet and three-and-a-half once claimed thousands of miles. Why! In Grandpa’s day there were no less than thirty-seven different gauges of track in our fair land, and Lord only knows how many the foreign countries had, with their millimeters and other measuring sticks. Today, in North America, the four-feet, eight-and-a-half-inchers have pretty well switched the non-standard lines off the railroad map. Of our own 227,000 miles of line 99-1/2 per cent is standard gauge, a scant 932 being something else--724 of it the Colorado three-footers. On only 380 miles is there a semblance of passenger service! Of Canada’s 42,000 miles, 90 is narrow gauge--the three-foot White Pass & Yukon Route. Mexico, however, hangs onto her slim gauge a little better and 2,400 of her total 12,600 miles of road is three-feet wide. The 809 mile Newfoundland Railway, three-and-a-half feet narrow, is likewise prosperously content with its non-conformity. Of the whole world’s railway mileage, 788,000--but let’s not get too involved here. Anyway, foreign lands still consider economical transportation more important than the distance between the rails, and many miles of narrow tracks still thread hill and dale beyond the seas. The very narrowest of them all, excepting some industrial tramway or miniature freak, was the vaunted two-footer. Sixty-centimeter, they call ’em over there, which is just another way of saying twenty-three and five-eighths inches. England had a few, and France has her famous “decaville” railways. The far East, Africa, and Australia still run generous two-foot mileage, and Latin America is pretty fond of the little cusses. Up here in our country, half a century ago, they blossomed like roses at sunrise, bloomed lustily through the morning, but wilted ere there’d been time for the winds of Fate to blow their pollen around in good shape. The top-puff midgets were the stout little virtuosi up in Maine. Their bantam chests jingled merrily with medals they’d won. A few scattered hybrids did some anemic bush-pushing elsewhere--one in Pennsylvania, one in New Mexico, and a third in Colorado’s icy mountains. They weren’t _real_ railroads, though. Either industrial outfits or kind of street-carrish affairs. That’s why I skipped ’em here. Had to draw the line somewhere.