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That doesn’t seem to be a charitable reading and in any case it has to do with wheel taper, more like cone than cylinder. More specifically the nature of the solution was getting two parts of the org, track and train, to work together. While that may seem elementary stuff, anyone at a big org can attest to how often it is tremendously difficult to do sometimes.

I write this not as an apologist for commuter rail, which I find excessively expensive and inflexible outside of very circumstances, but as an excuse to link to the lovely Feynman description of why train wheels are tapered:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y7h4OtFDnYE




I used to joke when the Subway wheels squealed “yeah that’s how the engineers designed that”

Turns out, it was.




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