19th century freight cars were much smaller than even a Toronto PCC.
Quote:
|
you say changing gauge is not especially difficult, but what about changing the gauge of large, interconnected networks?
|
I'm not sure what you're asking. PCC streetcars had their bogies regauged a few centimeters by local shops as they moved from city to city, from various US cities phasing them out to Mexican cities or Toronto—and in some cases, back to San Francisco for its Market Street operation. I don't know of any transit operation that has ever regauged its guideways, and the only large-scale network regauging I've ever heard of is
the one (maybe 3000 km in all) undertaken in the Southern US in 1886.
As 1435mm high-speed trains came to Spain (1668mm) and Japan (mostly 1067mm), they had to build entirely new lines and stations, and only regauged very short portions of the existing network.