Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge

"Unification to standard gauge on May 31 – June 1, 1886 [United States]

In 1886, the southern railroads agreed to coordinate changing gauge on all their tracks. After considerable debate and planning, most of the southern rail network was converted from 5 ft (1,524 mm) gauge to 4 ft 9 in (1,448 mm) gauge, then the standard of the Pennsylvania Railroad, over two days beginning on Monday, May 31, 1886. Over a period of 36 hours, tens of thousands of workers pulled the spikes from the west rail of all the broad gauge lines in the South, moved them 3 in (76 mm) east and spiked them back in place.[6] The new gauge was close enough that standard gauge equipment could run on it without problem. By June 1886, all major railroads in North America, an estimated 11,500 miles (18,500 km), were using approximately the same gauge. To facilitate the change, the inside spikes had been hammered into place at the new gauge in advance of the change. Rolling stock was altered to fit the new gauge at shops and rendezvous points throughout the South. The final conversion to true standard gauge took place gradually as part of routine track maintenance.[6] Now, the only broad-gauge rail tracks in the United States are on some city transit systems."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_gauge_in_the_United_Stat...

I wonder if one can do anything like this with the current concrete sleepers and thermite welded tracks.

The sleepers are molded with preset widths, however, and would need replacement.

It might be easier to change today than it was in 1886. Back then, trains were really the only means of travel between cities. Today, there are less passenger trains than back then, though more freight (even with trucks and planes). But freight diversions/delays could be scheduled well in advance and have alternative means. Not to mention, since then we've developed variable gauge train tech. A subset of trains could run during the cutover.

It's likely more costly today, but less disruptive.

The tolerances are just a bit tighter, the risks and liabilities are higher, and the workforce just isn't "there" - this is from a time when rail was a huge money earner and could afford to employ a huge number of people. Today? Not so much, pretty much anywhere in the World.

Remember that freight is more than just moving pallets of finished goods to Amazon warehouses. It doesn't matter if you've given the cows a month's advance notice, if they don't have feed they're still going to starve; and no matter how many KPIs you dangle at the silos, they're only going to hold x amount of reserve grain.

I don't think this is true in Europe. Certainly in the UK, passenger rail volume since the 2010s has set records higher than in any previous years, exceeding numbers that were last seen before WW2. Today there are fewer miles of track than there were in that era, but modern signalling technology allows more trains to operate safely on the same tracks, and modern trains run much faster on average.

As for freight, the US actually moves a significantly greater portion of its freight by rail than Europe does. Rail has around 40% modal share for freight in the US vs only 17% in Europe. One reason for this is that in Europe many lines are congested with passenger traffic, leaving few slots for freight trains to operate - except late at night.

I’d guess that overseas modern non-high speed trains could deal with it. The passengers might not put up with it though.

The Days They Changed the Gauge (1966) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8371773 (2014, 15 comments)

And a related discussion:

Why BART uses a nonstandard broad gauge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031131 (2022, 253 comments)

The BART discussion was where I first learned about the North American 2-day gauge change. A truly inspiring feat for so many engineers to come together across such a large amount of land area to Make It Happen.

Anyone looking at massive losses will pay the sticker shock to put it on trucks. Anyone who can afford to shut down instead will wait. That's the system working as intended.

It's not what you said

It's also that rail tends to be more competitive for long haul traffic, and the US operators have big trans-continental freight networks well suited to that. In Europe there's a sharp drop off in modal share as freight crosses borders. Each national railway operator is in practice fiercely protective of its own turf, and there are a lot of hurdles to overcome. So in practice cross-border freight is largely done with trucks instead.

Despite the EU commission wanting to get some competition going on the rails and better interoperability requirements etc etc. for at least the past 30 years, the operators are still in the "discussion about preparing to setup a committee to discuss interoperability" phase.

Though versions of the Convict Lease System had started earlier, even before the Civil War, it was in full force by 1886 and even accounted for a significant portion of many states’ annual revenue.

The supply of this labor was dramatically influenced by new laws that were selectively enforced, such as vagrancy laws that might apply to anyone traveling without immediate proof that they had an employer, “pig laws” that made petty thefts often convicted with poor standards of proof subject to extended prison sentences, and in some cases offenses like “mischief” and “insulting gestures”. There were even people who were impressed into this system as a result of violating the terms of a labor contract, which possibly becomes even more difficult to distinguish from slavery.

If you were caught up in this system, you were virtually powerless. Federal troops were long gone, there were instances of lawfully elected governments that had been overthrown by insurrection, and if you exposed the absurdity of this system and threatened it, you could easily be publicly lynched with no chance of repercussions for your murderers.

One such oddball is the TTC subway/streetcar gauge of 1495 mm in Toronto, Canada. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto-gauge_railways

Sure, but they do it with big machines that ride down the rails now instead of lining up thousands of men with sledge hammers.

If the US really wanted to get it done, they could involve the army and various state national guards. They have tons of trained semi and heavy truck drivers, way more than most people would assume. Most states also have tons of trained drivers for their massive snow plows and highway repair trucks and stuff. The only thing stopping these massive projects is money and lack of imagination.

Did you not see how the markets recently reacted to certain components merely doubling in cost due to tariffs? In what world do you live in where the agricultural margins are high enough that the cattle ranchers can just casually absorb a threefold cost increase? Clearly they're eating the loss, because if they passed those costs onwards in the chain there'd certainly be huge economic consequences, as I said, and you wouldn't have felt the need to try and correct my premise. Anyway, I'd like to visit this world of yours, though only if you'd be buying the meals.

> Freight rail mainly exists as an low cost bulk carrier of convenience these days.

This is what happens when one tries to create a narrative from DoT statistics.

The reason why rail freight tonnage is less than truck tonnage is long-haul vs short-haul. You deliver lumber from the timber yard to the finishing facility once. That's rail. You don't load up trucks with semi-finished logs on an industrial scale, you don't load them with coal, you don't load them with industrial quantities of gravel or sand or steel either.

Once you have the logs processed into boards, then you use trucks to carry those boards to various short-haul destinations, where some of the boards are further processed into fence pickets and bird houses and old-timey sign posts that Roadrunner can inadvertently spin around so Wile E ends up taking a completely wrong turn. All of that stuff then goes to storefronts and warehouses (also short-haul) and as a result, the short-haul tonnage can count twice, three times, or even more, depending on just how many steps are being taken between "tree" and "birdhouse".

> Ships outcompete rail for bulk goods along inland waterways

Which is great along inland waterways, but if you're not located along them, you're probably using rail to get the bulk goods to the shipyard.

Well, back then the US had freshly banned slavery, so there was an ample workforce that could be hired for dirt cheap.

The Soviets and the Wehrmacht pulled off similar feats in WW2, but back then the rails and sleepers didn't have to be built to last many decades, so in addition to loads upon loads of forced labor from concentration camps and gulags, the work effort was massively reduced because easier technology could be used.

Europe also has far more freight-friendly waterways. US rail is designed for dirt-cheap bulk transport for things like coal and grain. In most of Europe that's done by barge - but US geography doesn't really allow for that.

Note that the inverse situation is common at west coast ports, with short haul rail lines running to intermodal facilities so things can be loaded onto trucks for long haul. The cost of transloading to domestic containers often dominates keeping it on rails.

> The reason why rail freight tonnage is less than truck tonnage is long-haul vs short-haul. You deliver lumber from the timber yard to the finishing facility once. That's rail. You don't load up trucks with semi-finished logs on an industrial scale, you don't load them with coal, you don't load them with industrial quantities of gravel or sand or steel either.

Around here the timber arrives at the railyard by truck and aggregates are usually mined and transported locally, which is truck heavy. Grain is also majority truck these days from the BTS stats I can see, but basic materials isn't my industry.

Regardless, ton-miles aren't doubled counted. It's one ton, transported one mile. If rail took freight that extra distance, it'd get the same share (subject to all the usual caveats of industry numbers).

I also don't know where you're getting 125kV from. Many trains throughout the world use 25kV, especially high-speed ones (actually high speed, like 200+km/h), but BART uses 1000V, which is closer to a typical subway system.

So what? I'd there isn't a machine, you build one.

Large industries like mining and shipping and the military don't just stop because they can't buy a needed item off the shelf because there isn't a market for it. They build stuff all the time.

I worked in a factory for a few years, and can tell you that if industries followed your "can't do" attitude, commerce would stop.

Let’s say you have a problem and the only way to solve it is with a thingamabob. The thingamabob doesn’t exist, so you need to make the first one. Unknown to everyone, the military, the O&G/mining industry, and the rail industries all try to build one at the same time. Do you think they all cost the same? What about the time to design and build them?

The oil and gas people will call up some machinists and engineers the same day. Time is money and they need the problem solved. It doesn’t need to look pretty. I don’t think anyone would disagree that they would be the first with a thingamabob. First one might break, they’d get Bob on a Cessna from the nearest machine shop with a replacement.

The military would have some meetings, which would spawn more meetings, and eventually put out some requests for proposals. They’d review the proposals and ten years later they’d have their thingamabob. No doubt it would be the most expensive.

The rail industry… the modern, passenger rail industry in wealthy western countries? There might be proposals, or designs or prototypes with large amounts of money spent, but I think it is reasonable to say the thingamabob would never actually be built and used. Look at CAHSR or Stuttgart 21 or Turin-Lyon.

[https://www.train-museum.org/2019/02/18/black-railroad-jobs/]

Which part do you think I didn’t?

That's not a "change gauge for a 100-wagon freight train" scale operation, and it's not "off the shelf" tech, but we're fairly close I think?

Cargo ships beat everything hands down if there's a port close to your origin and destination, and lots of water in between.

I'm not a train guy, but I'm pretty sure the machine that lifts the track up and allows them to swap out the ties is like 95% of what would be needed for a gauge changing machine.

“Even getting white workers to couple cars didn’t happen until much later”

That’s an overstatement. While Black workers were indeed disproportionately given dangerous roles like coupling cars in the South, it wasn’t unheard of for white laborers - especially poor or immigrant - to do that work too

The labor structure wasn’t as racially absolute as you’re implying