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Re:Buy a train, bridge or tracks from the Swiss Railway by elil17 on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @10:26AM (#48476794)
Off topic, but some trains can even change gauge while in motion: https://www.reddit.com/r/trains/comments/kq6eds/this_is_how_...
Re:Buy a train, bridge or tracks from the Swiss Railway by m4rtink on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @11:13AM (#48477593)
This is actually quite a significant technical achievement - for example, a similar project in Japan failed.

Japanese Railways wanted to build a train that can run at full speed (~300 km/h) on the standard gauge (1435 mm) regular Shinkansen lines but also use the narrow gauge (1067 mm) existing lines at slower speed. Those older lines would not have to be rebuilt for the Shinkansen standard & there would still be significant time savings:

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

This failed to produce a viable train, resulting in falling back to track rebuilds or using relay trains that connect directly from Shinkansen to the local rail line on the same platform.

Re:Buy a train, bridge or tracks from the Swiss Railway by m463 on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @09:07PM (#48485015)
They don't seem to say why it didn't work.

I wonder if it was not just the change in gauge, but tolerances as well.

I got to see "Dr. Yellow" running on the shinkansen line and it checks everything out.

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

I wonder if the slower-speed lines have looser tolerances.

Then maybe running the gauge-change train on the slower lines might kill the train's tolerances before it moves back to the super smooth high-speed lines.

Re:Buy a train, bridge or tracks from the Swiss Railway by jeffrallen on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @11:30AM (#48477874)
Swiss trains can, but while stopped.

There's a station on the main line that loads full sized cars with tanks on them onto little bougies that take them up into the mountains for training.

Re:Buy a train, bridge or tracks from the Swiss Railway by mahkeiro on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @01:04PM (#48479327)
Swiss train can do it in motion, the post above is about the MOB train that can go from Montreux (meter gauge) to Interlaken (standard gauge).