Furthermore about the rail gauge, you mentioned that Russia used broad gauge because German can't use their train to run on Russian tracks. But there actually are trains which change their bogie because the route of it consists of different rail gauges. Take Train K3/4 (003/004 in Mongolia and Russia) of China for example. The K3 train departs from Beijing Station every Wednesday at 11:22, arrives at Ulaanbaatar every Thursday at 14:20, arrives at Novosibirsk every Saturday at 15:53, and finally arrives at Moscow Yaroslavskaya Station every Monday at 13:58. This train run once a week, for 7,692 kilometers, goes across 3 countries and changes locomotive for 10 times, once in China, twice in Mongolia. 7 times in Russia. Because China use standard gauge and Mongolia and Russia use the 1,520 mm gauge, so the train will have to stop at a border city called Erenhot for three hours in order to change the bogies. The carriages will be lifted up, the bogies will be pushed out and the new bogies will be pushed in. If I have the chance, I'll definitely take this train and see how this happens. I only saw it appears on the timetable sign once when I was at Beijing Station, on the way to Tianjin.
D25 From Beijing to Harbin (in Heilongjiang), departs at 7:15 and arrives at 15:19,
D21 From Beijing to Changchun (in Jilin), departs at 7:20 and arrives at 13:40,
K3 From Beijing to Moscow, departs at 7:47 and arrives at 14:28 (5 days later),
K23 From Beijing to Ulaanbaatar, departs at 7:47 and arrives at 13:20 (on the next day)
Y509 From Beijing to Longjiaying (Near Qinhuangdao, Hebei), departs at 7:50 and arrives at 11:17,
K7731 From Beijing to Tangshan (in Hebei), departs at 8:40 and arrives at 11:19.
What's more, Japan has been developing "Free Gauge Trains" since 1994. This kind of train will be used for running between high-speed lines and regular railways and is able to change the gauge of bogies by itself. The free gauge trains in Japan is expected to be in operation since 2022, after the open of Nagasaki Shinkansen. And as for Spain, Renfe's Series 120 has been operating since 2006 and its bogies use a special technology invented by CAF (Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles, Construction and Auxillary of Railways), a Spanish railway equipment company called BRAVA (Bogie de Rodadura de Ancho Variable Autopropulsado, the self-propelled Universal Variable Gauge as CAF claimed so because I'm bad in Spanish translation and I don't trust in Google), so the bogies can change the gauge between 1,668 mm and 1,435 mm without stopping, you can check out this website for further information and how it works.
I read the article about Cinco de Mayo. I'm surprised that this festival was originated in California, and was established by Americans. But it's fine too, as long as there is music and food, everyone will be happy. I found out that the amount of Latino and Hispanic population in the U.S. is actually very large, but first, I got to know what's the difference between Hispanic and Latino. An Hispanic person is a descendant of Spanish people, or people of countries that were once colonized by Spain, most refer to all-Spanish-speaking countries; and a Latino person only refers to a descendant of people from Latin America or a person who has the nationality of countries in Latin America. Because the website of U.S. census is so complicated so I use Wikipedia. The Hispanic and Latino population total in U.S. in 2010 is 50,477,954, and 14,013,719 of them were in California, 9,460,921 were in Texas. 14,013,719 is 60% of population of Taiwan! That was very much! And I believe that there is more in this year rather than 2010. Among these 50,477,954 people, 31,798,258 of them are Mexicans. It's one tenth of U.S. population! And in California, 3 of 10 people are Mexicans. No wonder there are so much places' names are in Spanish in California and Texas. The influence of Latino people is very large and we shouldn't ignore it.
Another thing I'm curious about in the newsletter is "Is there actually user of Portuguese(I never spell it right in once) in Macau? So, I browsed it on Wikipedia and I found one thing that is called Macanese Portuguese, and there are 2,810 users in 2001 (there are 247,000 people in Macau). So actually it's very few of them using it. I also found it very different to Spanish when listening to people speaking Portuguese, though many said the difference between Spanish and Portuguese is just like American English and British English. Now I realized because Spanish and Portuguese are different in speaking, but similar in writing. Wikipedia also told me that Portuguese people are likely to comprehend Spanish without learning, instead, Spanish people usually have to learn before they comprehend Portuguese. But then I still found Portuguese very different to other Latin languages rather than Spanish and that is because it's influenced by many other exotic languages. Anyway, in comparison, Italian is much easier to understand than Portuguese, so after I attend Spanish courses, I will start lo learn Italian first.
The next week is mid term so I don't have much time to do the response, so there will be no picture of the week. Hope you can still comment below, thanks very much!
Sincerely,
Melvyn Chou, 04/05/2017.
Melvyn,
ReplyDeleteYou do know your trains! For our discussion, we're going to call the entire bottom of a train car the "truck". Okay?
In going from one gauge to a different gauge, you have to change the distance between the wheels, and up to now, the best way to do this was to change out the entire 'truck". As you said, the entire car (or engine) was lifted off one truck, and shifted over to a different truck with the new gauge. As you can easily see, this is very time consuming, and is really not practical on a large scale.
Since the invention of trains, the goal of a 'variable gauge' truck have been everyone's ideal, but until very recently, it just hasn't been practical. Even now, as you stated, it's still not in common use. So, for now, the old idea of using a different railroad gauge than your potential enemy neighbor still holds true. As long as Russia and China are still dependent on railroads to move large amounts of men and military equipment, overhead images of train yards on the borders is a good indicator of future intentions.
I don't know how different "Macaunese Portuguese" is from regular Portuguese, but I'm sure that Macaunese Portuguese will be influenced by a lot of Cantonese words. In visits to Macau, and speaking with the people who live there, the number of people living there who speak any kind of Portuguese is so small that nobody bothers to learn it. Ironically, its still one of the official languages of Macau, so everything is still written in Chinese, Portuguese, and now English. I can read Spanish, so I had little trouble reading the Portuguese in Macau.
According to my European friends, you really only need to know ONE of Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese to be able to GET BY in the other two countries. I can't say very much about accents and dialects, though, except that they are much more pronounced that they are with Chinese, or even English. If you are from northern Italy, you will have a hard time understanding someone from Sicily. The same is true of northern and southern Spain. In Catalonia (NE Spain), they even have a different language (
Catalan) that is a blending of French and Spanish.
Don't get me started on French! I spent two years trying to learn French, and when I was in France, they refused to speak to me. I've never been back.