Fishbelly Rail

Depends whether the rails were cast iron (generally 3' lengths) or wrought iron (15' or so lengths). With cast iron rails curves were made up of successive straight segments, just as they had normally been with plate rail (for //really// tight curves, as in things a man-pushed tram might just go around, you might have rails cast as curves, but you'd not have a normal wag(g)on, let alone an engine on track like that). With wrought iron rail the track would be bent to follow the curve, much like a modern rail would be. You'd get a bit of variation in the bend, with more bend at the narrowest part of the rail, but the effects of this weren't enough to bother anyone. Engines were light and speeds low.

With the cast-iron rails every sleeper supported a rail joint. Certainly sleepers were set to fall under rail joints with the wrought-iron rail too - recall that in the days of fish-belly rail sleepers were likely to be stone blocks, not cross-timbers.

With three feet lengths of C.I. fishbelly rail, and sleeper/stone block at each rail joint, and with curves made up of a series of tangents each three feet long, by the time one had got from one end of a long curve to the other, the rail joints would be way out of alignment, and if on sleepers the sleepers would be at odd angles to the rail. Did they perhaps allow greater gaps between the rail ends on the outer rails to allow for this? Regards, Bill.

Aberystwyth

Probably just staggered the sleeper blocks to keep them under the rail-ends. There may also have been shorter sections cast to compensate for this: I'll have a look in the Early Railways Conference Proc.s tonight & see if there's anything on the care and feeding of cast

-iron rail.