The Days They Changed the Gauge (1966) | Hacker News Reader

The Days They Changed the Gauge (1966)

southern.railfan.net

59 pointsrtpg15 comments

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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)

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

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

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.

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

Wayback link: https://web.archive.org/web/20140707014414/http://southern.r...

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:"

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

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

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

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