

The Days They Changed the Gauge (1966) - rtpg
http://southern.railfan.net/ties/1966/66-8/gauge.html

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D-Coder
"...crews of various sizes charged with various goats" \-- should be "goals".
That really threw me for a bit.

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tibbon
I read that and thought, "I didn't know goats were such good work animals!"

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Animats
There are still some seriously annoying gauge incompatibilities in the world.
The biggest one is that Russia and the CIS states use a metric gauge,
incompatible with both Western Europe and China. The UK and Europe still use
crappy link and pin couplers from the 19th century on freight equipment, which
is just insane at this late date. Somebody has to climb in between cars to
couple them, and car and train sizes are limited because the coupler design is
weaker than the US AAR coupler or Russian couplers.

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theoh
In Spain they have variable-gauge trains. The train is driven slowly across
the junction; each bogie has various projections that are engaged by control
rails to take the weight off the wheels, unlock the wheels, slide them to the
new gauge, and lock them in place again. Pretty surprising. Has been in
service since 1969.

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ams6110
_wheel trucks being changed at interchange points as necessary_

This is still done in trains between China and North Korea, maybe other
places, to accomodate for different gauges.

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bewo001
Some trains between Spain and France have a variable gauge. It takes some time
to pass the gauge changer, but you can remain seated.

[wikipedia]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_gauge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_gauge))

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lmm
I thought this was going to be about the GWR in Britain (e.g.
[http://lionels.orpheusweb.co.uk/RailSteam/GWRBroadG/BGHist.h...](http://lionels.orpheusweb.co.uk/RailSteam/GWRBroadG/BGHist.html)
). Again the big conversion was made over a single weekend.

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ams6110
See also "H Day" when Sweden switched from left to right drive.
Retrofitting/replacing buses with doors on the other side was one of the
biggest expenses.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H)

~~~
lepton
Reading this link, it seems that accidents and fatalities were substantially
reduced for some time after the switch, due to extra caution being exercised
by all drivers.

The lesson: Switch the standard every couple of years or so.

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sudhirj
And here I thought it was really cool when I migrated a 1GB database from
MySQL to Postgres.

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sbierwagen
Wayback link:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20140707014414/http://southern.r...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140707014414/http://southern.railfan.net/ties/1966/66-8/gauge.html)

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beernutz
Ok, did anyone else notice the reference to "John Gault"? I know it is spelled
slightly differently by Ayn Rand, but I found it amusing none the less.
Probably just my brain miss-firing. lol

From the article:

"One farsighted man rose on the Convention's second day to ask that the gauge-
size decision be reconsidered. He was John C. Gault, general manager of the
Cincinnati, New Orleans & Texas Pacific, and he made some persuasive
arguments:"

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notjustanymike
Three providers forced to improve speeds because of competition... where have
I heard this before?

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angersock
That's not quite an accurate summation--the issue was that handoff between
incompatible standards caused delays, and had to be fixed.

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tibbon
I thought this was really interesting to read, because it hinted to me that
with enough buy-in... that even a physically embedded and implemented standard
_can_ change if enough effort is put in. This gives me hope for some digital
standards and updates

