The humble Picatinny rail has been a part of modern gun culture for as long as I can remember. This ingenious system is standardized worldwide, making adding all kinds of accessories to your rifles and pistols easy. These rails can hold lights, optics, vertical foregrips, bipods, lasers, and even stocks these days. The famed rail system is the standard for Western military forces, and every modern rifle and handgun likely comes with one form of rail or another.
Have you ever found yourself attaching an optic to a rifle and wondering, where did this rail come from? What’s its story? Who was the mastermind behind it, and when did it make its debut on firearms? As a writer, I’m fortunate that my curiosity can fuel my work, and the Picatinny rail system is a fascinating topic to explore.
The story of the M-1913 Picatinny rail system is complex, woven together by the contributions of several innovative minds. It’s not a tale with a single inventor or a specific creation date. The development of this rail system was a gradual process, with each iteration building upon the previous one. Surprisingly, the rail wasn’t born in 1913 and wasn’t the first rail system to exist.
The History of Rails
Dovetail rails are often credited as the first firearm rails. They were often built into the gun itself to allow for optics mounting. Dovetail mounts are not standardized and come in a ton of different widths, ranging from 9.5 mm to 15 mm. The only thing standardized about these rails is that they are all reverse trapezoids. These rails have mostly fallen out of favor but were used on some military rifles, including the early models of the British SA-80 series of weapons.
The Soviets had a different take on Dovetail rails. They mounted them to the side of their rifles and machine guns. These rails attached a dedicated optics mount and optic that pushed up and over the firearm’s receiver. They are roughly 14 mm wide, often called the Warsaw Pact rail.
William Ralph Weaver improved the Dovetial design into the Weaver rail. The Weaver rail is where we see the early formation of what eventually became the Picatinny rail. These rails were detachable and had the familiar trench and hill-type design with several locking slots for mounting scope rings.
The Weaver rail system comes in both single-piece and two-piece varieties. The initial rails were designed for bolt-action rifles, and the two-piece systems sat on the forward and aft positions of the bolt. Like the Dovetail, the Weaver rail lacked standardization.
The Rise of the Picatinny Rail
Earl Reddick of Reddicks Arms Development would take the Weaver rail and standardize the design. He produced rails that were all the same, with great care taken to be precise in their production. The design and specifications were made transparent and held to a tight standard. This became the M1913 Rail and was produced in 1988, so 1913 wasn’t a reference to the year. Reedicks Arms Development produced the rings and rails for Remington’s prototype M24 Sniper Weapon System.
Seeing potential in a rail system for optics, the US Military immediately became interested. Specifically, the Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey began looking to develop a rail system for military rifles. Picatinny Arsenal reached out to Richard ‘Dick’ Swann, the owner and CEO of A.R.M.S. Inc, for help.
Dick Swan and A.R.M.S. Inc aren’t one of those companies the average gun guy or gal often knows off the top of their head. However, military clone nerds, black rifle enthusiasts, and serious shooters know all about A.R.M.S. Inc. They are a company whose influence is felt in most modern ARs.
Dick Swan hit the ground running and jumped on the research and development of a potential rail system. In 1995, Mr. Swan obtained a patent for the rail system. Picatinny Arsenal developed the MIL-STD-1913 rail based on Mr. Swan’s work, and the U.S. military accepted the system.
As we all know, the MIL-STD-1913 consists of a rail with raised ridges and spacing slots. It allows for a standard mounting system for accessories, and the uniform nature allows all manner of manufacturers to produce compatible attachments.
Railed Rifles
Weaver, Reddick, Swan, Picatinny Arsenal, and others designed their rails for rifles specifically to attach optics. Rails made their way to rifles, including ARs, before the MIL-STD-1913 was a thing. The earliest I’ve found in the world of ARs is the Colt 656 Sniper. This had a flat top upper receiver with a Weaver rail attached to mount your optic of choice.
The first time we saw a MIL-STD-1913 Picatinny rail on a military rifle was the M4 series. While an initial order of M4s had carry handles, in the mid-1990s, the military switched to the flat-top M4. In 1997, the military adopted the M16A4, a flat-top variant of the M16. 1997 was also the first year that Knight’s Armament RAS system was sold to the United States military.
The RAS, or Rail Adaptor System, gave troops a railed handguard called a quad rail because there were four rails mounted on the top, the bottom, the left, and the right of the rail. These became standard in the United States Army and Marine Corps, and by 1999, Knights sold a million rails to the United States Military.
The story goes that Reed Knight saw guys attaching lights to the rifle with duct tape or hose clamps and rightly assumed there was a better way to do business. Since then, rails for optics and accessories have become the standard for modern rifles. They’ve expanded well beyond the AR series, and we slap rails on absolutely every rifle and shotgun we possibly can.
Handguns and Rails
Attaching accessories to handguns predates rail systems. There were lasers that mounted over the top, and then the LPC 310, which, due to its unique body and design, attached to an M1911 without a rail.
Handguns and rails predate the MIL-STD-1913 rail. HK worked on the Mark 23 with its proprietary rail system in the early 1990s. The LAM was a very early handgun accessory designed to allow the user to aim the weapon while wearing night vision. Rails on handguns had a bit of a string where proprietary was the standard.
Adapters like those from Dawson Precision allow shooters to retrofit their existing guns with light rails. Force Recon famously used these adapters on their MEU(SOC) pistols.
In 1998, Glock released the Gen 3 with the Glock Universal Rail, which is mostly Pic rail compatible. However, it wasn’t until 2001 that Kimber released the TLE/RL with a real MIL-STD-1913 rail. That quickly became the popular standard. Most companies go with the MIL-STD-1913 rail on their duty and compact handguns, and most companies producing accessories adhere to that standard.
The Evolution of the MIL-STD-1913
Time passes, and concepts evolve. NATO standardized the MIL-STD-1913 as the STANAG 2324 rail. Eventually, that evolved into the STANAG 4694 NATO Accessory Rail. The new 4694 features a few changes, namely a metric reference drawing, tighter tolerances, and some additional new tolerances.
We’ve also seen the rise of modular rails, namely KeyMod and M-LOK, with some other options from companies like Troy. M-LOK ultimately won that battle and has become one of the standard options for most rifle companies. There have been experiments with powered rails that would power accessories, but those have seemingly been in their infancy for the last 15 years.
Ultimately, the MIL-STD-1913 rail forms the abscess for all of these systems. It’s become so ingrained into gu culture that its spot is now permanent. Until we have some high-tech alternatives, the MIL-STD-1913 rail will continue to dominate.
