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The expedients of lifting cars bodily to other trucks, of making axles adjustable, and even of laying a third rail, proved unsatisfactory. Late in the sixties and early in the seventies the Great Western and the Grand Trunk had to adopt the four-foot-eight-and-a-half-inch gauge solely, and other lines gradually followed. Meanwhile, the cry was going up for a still narrower gauge.
But in the United States, as in England, the four-foot-eight-and-a-half-inch width was dominant, and would have been adopted in Canada without question, had not local interests, appealing, as often, to patriotic prejudice, succeeded in clouding the issue.
'Before every engine, declares Mr H. G. Wells, 'trots the ghost of a superseded horse. When the steam locomotive was invented, and used upon the coal-mine tramways, it was made of the same four-foot-eight-and-a-half-inch gauge.
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