Trains in Germany, Russia and the US: Dots that never connected before

I ride a train at least twenty times a month going back and forth from home to Chicago for work, but rarely think about the infrastructure of what it takes for Metra to make that happen. I find the trains are clean and regularly run on time. The conductors clearly have individual personalities and to the person, embody training in courteously saying thank you and impactfully dealing with inebriated riders and others who pretend to sleep or don’t want to pay. In the worst of winter, the gas burners and blue flames shooting from the switches always amaze me, in the sense that they seem so retro, old school in dealing with the ice.

Today, in a conversation about work, a friend told me that a customer of his company has a plant in Ludington, MI (where I spent Friday night) that makes the vehicles that ride the rails to fix them. They started out making, as he called them, “The Bugs Bunny cars”. You know… the ones that Bugs and maybe some else teeter-totter pump to escape the mind shaft where someone tossed the TNT with the short fuse? The next thing he said, caught my attention. At least in the United States the rails are for the most part uniform in gage and size. Russia has a different size from Germany, they didn’t want to make it easy for them to invade.