page_title: Break of gauge
section_title: Overcoming a break of gauge
hierarchical_section_title: Break of gauge / Overcoming a break of gauge
caption_attribution_description: English: Political cartoon depicting the evils of the break of gauge on the railway at Gloucester in 1846. In historical hindsight it is known that the chaotic nature of transloading at Gloucester in the 1840s was deliberately maximized as a spectacle to serve as a political weapon in the Gauge War, and that ways of mitigating it were available but were not implemented. Regardless, at the time such chaos was widely interpreted as an obvious lesson in the folly of allowing more than one gauge, and it had real impact on public opinion.
context_page_description: With railways, a break of gauge occurs where a line of one gauge meets a line of a different gauge: specifically a different track gauge. Trains and rolling stock cannot run through without some form of conversion between gauges, and freight and passengers must otherwise be transshipped. A break of gauge adds delays, cost, and inconvenience.
context_section_description: Where trains encounter a different gauge, such as at the Spanish–French border or the Russian–Chinese one, the traditional solution has been transloading (often called transshipment in discussions of break of gauge), that is, the transfer of passengers and freight to cars on the other system. When transloading from one gauge to another, often the quantities of rolling stock are unbalanced between the two systems, leading to more idle rolling stock on one system than the other. This is obviously far from optimal, and some other schemes have been devised.
  Various solutions other than transloading were conceived even in the early era of railways in Britain (including rollbocks, transporter wagons, dual gauge, and even containerization or variable gauge axles), but they were not implemented during the nastiest flare-up of the Gauge War in the 1840s, which resulted in horrendous spectacles of confused and wasteful transloading. L. T. C. Rolt's biography of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (mastermind of the broad gauge) remarks on the apparent mysteriousness of this lack of implementation, but a likely explanation is that the combatants at the time were more interested in winning the Gauge War, defeating the other gauge, than in demonstrating how peaceful coexistence could be developed. Rolt states that the shocking confusion seen in an editorial cartoon of transloading chaos at Gloucester in 1843 was deliberately contrived, as later admitted by a railway goods manager, as a spectacle for a visiting parliamentary committee. Rolt states that the germ of the idea of containerization was known even at this time, which is interesting in that the full potential of containerization was not thoroughly developed until a century later, after World War II.
  Lack of a standard gauge was a significant problem in transportation in the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War.
caption: A cartoon depicting the horrors of goods transfer at the break of gauge at Gloucester in 1843
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