5 ft 6 in gauge railway
distance between the rails – (5′ 6″); commonly used in South Asia, Argentina, Chile, and on San Francisco BART
5 ft 6 in (1,676 mm), also known as the Indian gauge, is a broad track gauge, used on Indian, Pakistani, western Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Argentine and Chilean railway systems, and on the BART system in the San Francisco Bay Area, United States.
In North America, it is called Indian, Provincial, Portland, or Texas gauge (or in the San Francisco Bay Area region of California, BART gauge). In Argentina and Chile, it is known as trocha ancha (Spanish for "broad gauge"). In the Indian subcontinent, it is simply known as "broad gauge". It is the widest gauge in use of heavy-duty mainline railways in the world.
Asia
India
In India, the initial freight railway lines were built using standard gauge. In the 1850s, the Great Indian Peninsula Railway adopted the gauge of 1,676 mm (5 ft 6 in) for the first passenger railway in India between Bori Bunder in Bombay and Thane. This was then adopted as the standard for the nationwide network.
Indian Railways today predominantly operates on 1,676 mm (5 ft 6 in) broad gauge. Most of the metre gauge and narrow gauge railways have been converted to broad gauge.
“5 ft 6 in gauge railway” enters the record as distance between the rails – (5′ 6″); commonly used in South Asia, Argentina, Chile, and on San Francisco BART. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what gauge, railway and distance can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1493335. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “5 ft 6 in gauge railway” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.