In other words, what was the shorthand expression to describe the less-affluent and/or morally questionable neighborhood or town from which undesirable or untrustworthy people originated, before the railroad came along and provided a handy turn of phrase? In fact, was there even a common, widely-recognized expression (wrong side of the river? out past the pigyards? New Jersey?) available to be supplanted?
Or (WAG alert) did “wrong side of the tracks” catch on because it happened to coincide with newly applicable social factors* and thus the phrase came along just at the time when there was a need for it?
*(the rapid industrial expansion of cities, and the rise of a working underclass, combined with greater mobility of same via the rails, resulting in a large work-chasing population that originated elsewhere and needed to be housed, typically near the tracks that brought them to town, but that made the locals nervous because the immigrants were basically strangers)
I got an email a long time ago. I’ll get some details wrong but it said something like:
The Space Shuttle’s largest component (liquid oxygen tank?) had size restraints during engineering because they knew they’d have to transport it by train. Since trains go through tunnels etc., the component couldn’t be bigger than the tunnel.
The width of the tunnels was determined in part by the width of the tracks…how was that width determined? We copied what the English had done. How did the English pick the width? They were using the size of Roman roads. And the Romans built them according to the chariots that they drove. So it goes back to making roads big enough for horses to pass. The widest point of the horse—the ass. IIRC the punchline was that something about the space shuttle depending on a couple of horse’s asses to get off the ground.
IOW, if that email was accurate, tracks came from roads…which might have come from the tracks left by the wheels when there were no paved roads.
That’s an urban legend. Tracks for railroads were built in a multitude of widths before standardization and the need for interconnection forced them to converge. There’s no good evidence it’s the Roman width or that the Romans had a standard width that was ever equivalent to the railroads.
The use of “slums” does predate railroads, but not by much.
There probably wasn’t a single equivalent term earlier than that. Cities always had vast numbers of the poor, but they were less physically separated than they became after the Industrial Revolution. Buildings from ancient Rome to Revolutionary-era Paris, for example, were built on a similar principle. The bottom floor had shops and a large living area for the owner, who may also have had the second floor. Floors above them were divided into smaller and smaller rooms, with those on the top floor - the worst since you had to walk up several bad flights of stairs - being a warren of tiny cubicles. The super-rich might have had their own exclusive sections but most people lived and worked at their houses in socially- and economically-mixed areas.
Only after the Industrial Revolution do we see most western cities conforming to the modern distinction of slums, working class, middle class and upper class areas. So “the other side of the tracks” as a phrase only came into being when the concept was first widely needed. The tracks, BTW, were always at grade level in those days instead of being raised on bridges over roads as they are today. Crossing the tracks was always dangerous because of the irregularity of tracks and the lack of any signals.
When the classes are separated, the poorer people lived where the wastes went: downhill, downriver, or downwind.
Thus in Rome, the rich family estates were at the top of the seven hills, the middle class & poor lived downhill from them.
In the Middle Ages, the poor tended to live down river from the richer people.
And later, especially after industry & home heating produced lots of chimneys, the rich lived upwind and the poor downwind. That continues even today: in London, prevailing winds are from the west, so the poorer people live in the East End, like the popular TV show EastEnders.
I read somewhere a longtime ago that the origin of The Wrong Side of the Tracks came from U.S. railroad towns used for shipping cattle,the permament residents wanted the business and cowboys after a long hard cattle drive wanted to unwind so the compromise was that saloons,brothels etc.were allowed to open up but only on one side of the railroad whereas the respectable people and businesses lived and worked on the other.
In Bristol and AFAIK London, there tends to be some contempt for those ‘South of the River’ - but this may just be a fairly arbitrary suspicion of ‘the other’…
Your email is worse than that. Ref Space Shuttle external tank - Wikipedia the tank is 27-1/2 feet in diameter and is carried by barge. That’s why it’s manufactured in Michoud LA on the Gulf coast.
I think it’s safe to say there are few if any railroad tunnels or road overpasses in teh US which would pass a 28 foot tall item sitting on a flat car.
