What do you do when you need to move your narrow gauge rail cars onto standard-sized tracks? If you were working for the old Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad near Salida in the early 20th Century, you would just pick up the smaller narrow gauge car and dump its contents into a larger standard gauge gondola.
How hard can that be?
Harder than it sounds, judging by the apparatus depicted in this photo.
Of course this was exactly the kind of mechanical engineering problem that railroad workers tackled with aplomb until standard gauge tracks became the norm in most parts of the United States (and the rest of the world).
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Comments
The cars on the train from Warsaw to Lviv have to be lifted off their wheels and set down on new wheels to accommodate the narrow gauge tracks the Czars laid to keep invaders out. It takes three hours to "change trains" at Przemysl.
The ability of engineers to craft solutions for problems that most of us would never even dream of, like this one, is one of the things that makes history so compelling. Thanks for sharing that with us, Joe.
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