False rails and their importance

False rails are extensively used in Indian racecourses and except the classic or important race days most of the race days have different width of false rails , sometimes to fox the railbirds . following article is an attempt to clarify few notions of the race goers.
A thoroughbred is trained to run almost along a straight line and to facilitate this permanent wooden (now plastic) rails are laid along the main track and the racing distances (1000m, 1600m, 2400m, etc.) are measured with respect to these rails . Every runner tries to ‘hug’ these rails to travel the shortest way and the heavy pounding of their hooves affect the turf surface which takes time to ’re-grow’ or come back to normal shape unlike a AWT surface or the ‘dirt’ surface of U.S. tracks . To enable this turf track to recover , false rails are placed few meters away from the permanent rails which varies from few meters to as wide as 13 meters for Mumbai .If the races are run on a straight course then false rails would not have much effect on the final time of a race but due to constraint of space all the tracks in India and other countries are mostly oval shaped or elliptical and will have 1 , 2 , 3 or 4 bends for the distance of 1000m to 2400m (Mumbai has only one bend from 1600m to winning post (WP) while Bangalore and Hyderabad have almost 3 bends along a 1600m stretch ) . While Chennai and Hyderabad tracks are basically triangular in shape most of other are oval and the length of the bend also varies from track to track . For example the Mumbai bend starts roughly from 800m to 600m the Bangalore’s semicircular bend starts from 950m to 450m ( that is why a 1000m race cannot be run here) . Therefore, these peculiarities will affect the final time of races run on different tracks .

Let us come down to false rails . As said earlier , false rails do not affect a straight course but it INCREASES THE DISTANCE COVERED ALONG A BEND OR A CURVE. A false rail of 1m will increase the distance by 3m (1 length) for Bangalore but will increase it by 1.6m for Mumbai and thus 5m false rails will increase the travel distance by 15m( 5 ½ lengths) for Bangalore and 8 m for Mumbai (these are rough approximations given as an example and can be refined further for mathematical calculations- which is beyond the scope of this article) and thus the final timings with false rails will be slower . this was the case in the last century and in 70’s 80’s and 90’s the timings with false rails were slower because no compensation for increase distance due to use of false rails was given . But since lasr t few years , Mumbai/Pune , Bangalore/Mysore and Hyderabad have started using Rodometer to compensate this increase in distance due to false rails . The distance is NOW measured one to two meter away from the false rails and the starting gates are placed accordingly . This theoretically enables a runner to travel the actual distance as published for the race in the programme . Therefore, the effect of false rails on Indian tracks is now negligible or almost redundant …
In USA they give the exact distance of the race run ,e.g., 1002m(for 1000m), 1201m ,1603m etc. as measured by Rodometer…