In Russia I believe there are still coaches that are detached from one train and attached to another. This way you can go from Moscow all the way to Bar, Montenegro all in one coach (unless they changed something).
Of course, trains do stop before detaching-attaching takes place.
Oh yes, but those are through coaches[1] and they're still fairly common, especially for sleeper trains. The whole fun with slip coaches is that they'd be detached while the train was moving.
In Italy this (not with moving coaches, of course) is business as usual for long range trains going to Sicily. A single train is break up in two after being ferried to Messina by ship, a part going west towards Palermo and a second part going southwest towards Catania.
Is there some spambot that randomly picks an article from Wikipedia and posts it to YC?
(The subject is one of the older bad ideas from British railroad practice, along with brake vans, buffer and chain couplers, and two-axle boxcars. In the US, Congress passed the Railroad Safety Appliance Act in 1893, and by 1900, all railroad cars and engines had to have air brakes and automatic couplers. Because of this forced standardization, boxcars could become much bigger and heavier. The UK and much of the EU still don't have fully standardized automatic couplers for freight trains.)
Whenever I see wikipedia.org on hn, I know it's going to be something good.
So they used to detach cars from moving trains with passengers in them in order to keep the express running? Like, in real life and not in a cartoon? Hacker news, indeed.
[+] [-] guard-of-terra|10 years ago|reply
Of course, trains do stop before detaching-attaching takes place.
They also change axles at gauge border.
[+] [-] atomwaffel|10 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_coach
[+] [-] gtufano|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbrownnyc|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgc195|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samdb|10 years ago|reply
I frequently have to get into a particular set of carriages on my journey home from central London, as the train divides en route.
[+] [-] arjie|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
(The subject is one of the older bad ideas from British railroad practice, along with brake vans, buffer and chain couplers, and two-axle boxcars. In the US, Congress passed the Railroad Safety Appliance Act in 1893, and by 1900, all railroad cars and engines had to have air brakes and automatic couplers. Because of this forced standardization, boxcars could become much bigger and heavier. The UK and much of the EU still don't have fully standardized automatic couplers for freight trains.)
[+] [-] karmacondon|10 years ago|reply
So they used to detach cars from moving trains with passengers in them in order to keep the express running? Like, in real life and not in a cartoon? Hacker news, indeed.
[+] [-] beefman|10 years ago|reply
And I hope so. They've been better than the links they've displaced 100% of the time.
[+] [-] morgante|10 years ago|reply
If random Wikipedia articles routinely get a lot of upvotes, I'm not sure it's a spambot.