And so we sit puzzled by the crashing clunks that jerk us off our seats as we go slowly back and forth into a huge maintenance shed. Once in the shed we look across at a train that has been dismantled into single carriages on the track next to us. Each carriage is slowly being lifted off it's wheels by four huge orange hydraulic jacks and the bogies are being drawn out on long steel cables. There are people sat in the carriages and on the side it says "Beijing to Ulaan Bataar" - how can we be sat parallel to our own dismantled train? Racing Jon to the end of our carriage, we find it has been uncoupled from it's neighbors and is similarly being lifted off it's wheels. Not being the brightest family on the trans-mongolian rail system, we try to work out what is going on.
Jon suggests that maybe there was a nail on the track and it burst all the tires so they have to fix them all. We double check and discover that trains have metal wheels and no tires... Michelle wonders if the sandstorm we went through earlier in the day has damaged the axels... Finally it starts to dawn on us that maybe the Chinese and Mongolian tracks are different sizes and they need to change the bogies.
Sure enough, once connected to the internet at Ulaan Bataar, we discover the well documented phenomena of the Erlian bogie change where the 1,435 mm standard gauge used by China is changed to the Russian 1,520 mm gauge used by Mongolia. It seems that this is in all the guidebooks and everyone knows about it. Having dumped our guide book in Laos, to us it was a fantastic mystery! We resolve never to bother with a guidebook again - it takes all the fun out of things.
Apparently the gauge is changed back on the Belarus/ Polish border - something to look forward to but unfortunately this time we will know exactly what's going on.
- Posted by Dave using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:Ulaan Bataar, Mongolia
