At 20:12 +0100 01/03/8, Han Maenen wrote:
>The BWMA also claims that French railway engineers habitually refer to
>standard gauge not as 1435 mm but as 4 pieds 8-1/2 pouces. It would be
>shocking and crazy if that should be true and it would be a major coup for
>the BWMA. I hope that some French railway engineer just and only used it
>while explaining its origins to the public on TV and that the BWMA turned
>that into a piece of disinformation. Why any metric trained engineer should
>prefer this broken foot-inch value to the neat metric value of 1435 mm is
>absolutely beyond me.
I know a number of French railway engineers : I can assure you that
when they refer to "standard gauge", they mean 1435 mm ; none of them
is aware that this is equivalent to 4 feet 8 1/2 inches.
BTW, the "non-standard" gauge is ... 1,00 m : many local railways
were built on that gauge, called "voie métrique".
For an exhaustive list of railroad gauges in the world, go to
http://turksib.com/gauges/index-e.html
Louis
