The article doesn't mention the downside of such broad gauge, which is the very wide bends required. It also doesn't give any particular justification for this choice.
1.) This was at the beginning of commercial mass air travel and freight transport.
Limited by range, speed, and weight for decades to come. Economics. Luxury.
Now search for the few surviving pictures of the spacious interior of the passenger wagons, and try to imagine how it would be to travel in them with 200 to 250kph.
Which was the intended speed, and already technically possible at the times. Even with normal gauge steam trains on good tracks.
2.) About the wide bends, no sleepers and ballast.
Look at any HSR > 250kph operating today. All of them are ballast- and sleeperless, so called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballastless_track
or https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feste_Fahrbahn
Sharp bends? Nope. Why? Look at how any HSR is tracked and profiled out of the inner cities, be it by tunneling, or really long bridges. Japan, France, Germany, China...
Building BIG with concrete was a thing then, just look at early 'Autobahn'. No tarmac, just big slabs of concrete. The same could be said for parts of the US at the time.
3.) BIG freight, simplifying construction of all sorts of things. Bigger prefabrication, less need for assembly on site.
F.i. https://static1.simpleflyingimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/... ,
chemical reactor(cracker tower), pressure vessel, tank, prefabedd house parts, or whole not so small houses, whatever.
They had no containers then, but imagine instead of double-stacking them like it is done now in the US, having two rows of them double-stacked, maybe even 3 by 3.
4.) This is NOT insane. The world has been thrown back, or at least stopped in its tracks in many sectors by WWII. It only seems so, because you don't know it any different. And any big thinking is associated with Nazism. Which is ridiculous, because other nations have been building big too, then, and before.
Afterwards, not so much anymore. Because thrown back...
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isambard_Kingdom_Brunel comes to mind,
he's choosen 2.140mm for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Western_Railway initially.
Fwiw, I was using "insane" in sense 6 here: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/insane:
> Slang. excessive or extravagant; extreme:
> This much snow in April is just insane!
And by that I'm not meaning the countries which have lost that war, but the world as a whole.
Because that established certain economic realities. Which led to bland architecture and interior design. Shaping miserable cities.
Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Nouveau with much of what is normal and contemporary now.
Let that sink in, and ask yourself in which environment you'd rather live in?
Excessive mass production of goods because of retooling of the now useless war machinery/factories.
Shism between Capitalism and Socialism/Communism. Propaganda.
Leading to the Cold War and the real rise of the Military Industrial Complex.
Car culture. Consumerism. Environmental destruction. More Propaganda.
Reinforcing of economical realities and the ways https://thecorporation.com HAS TO work, because otherwise it faces failure.
Leading to new oligarchies, overlords, corruption of weakened governments, destruction of the middle class, and so on...
More propaganda?
zeristor•9mo ago