Even excluding purely industrial lines in the United Kingdom, Rob Merrifield's article misses some of the earliest medium-gauge steam railways. I use medium-gauge to include all those between 891 mm, three Swedish feet, and 1067mm (31/2 English feet), as in practice there was little difference in the ability of these lines, from gauge alone, to perform a transport task. Any difference in such ability came from the standards to which they were built, rather than gauge. The reasons for the different gauges in that range is mostly that they were round multiples of then current local measurements in feet which existed prior to adoption of metric measures.
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