Quote:
Originally Posted by electricron
The main reason to standardize the gauge is to reduce the number of car transfers required with huge numbers of freight cars, thereby reducing the costs of shipping on a national scale. Shippers on the BNSF line in Fort Worth should be able to ship to customers on the UP line in San Antonio, without having to pay to change cars or change a car's gauge.
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That's valid for heavy rail.
Quote:
Originally Posted by electricron
Stand alone transit systems in a city could operate on any gauge, as long as that transit vehicle never leaves any individual line or group of lines using the same gauge.
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Yet new ones are always built to a regular gauge, usually standard gauge. Existing large networks with uncommon gauges might be, for all intents and purposes, impossible to convert to a regular gauge.
One way to convert, when a fleet is renewed is to provide the network with dual gauge track while the old non-standard fleet and the new standardized fleet shares tracks, but dual gauge track is not always possible.