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A transporter wagon, in railway terminology, is a wagon (UIC) or railroad car (US) designed to carry other railway equipment. Normally, it is used to transport equipment of a different rail gauge. In most cases, a transporter wagon is a narrower gauge wagon for transporting a wider gauge equipment, allowing freight in a wider gauge wagons to reach destinations on the narrower gauge network without the expense and time of transshipment into a narrower gauge wagons. This is an attempt to overcome one of the primary problems with differing gauge systems—gauge incompatibility. However, it means that the narrower gauge network must be built to a structure gauge large enough to accommodate the loading gauge of the wider gauge equipment, negating one of the cost advantages of a narrower gauge construction. Additionally, a large wider gauge wagon balanced on a narrower gauge transporter wagon is not very stable, and is generally restricted to low speeds of or so. Transporter wagons have seen varying popularity. They were quite common on German and some Swiss systems; a transporter wagon is a ''ドイツ語:Rollwagen'' in German. Transporter wagons were uncommon in North America, where the practice of exchanging trucks was more common, as was at one time the case on CN's Newfoundland Railway at Port aux Basques. They were used on the Paw Paw Railroad of Paw Paw, Michigan for a short time, and on a short stretch of track of the defunct Bradford, Bordell and Kinzua Railroad by lumberman Elisha Kent Kane. They were used in the United Kingdom on the Leek and Manifold Valley Light Railway. ==Transporter flatcar== Transporter wagons were used extensively for a great many years also in Austria (gauge ), Switzerland ( Brünigbahn) and Sweden (gauges , , and ). This was a boon especially to exchange traffic on the extensive Swedish 891 mm network, which once comprised almost - in fact a number of local country areas in southern Sweden had nearly no (standard gauge) lines at all, just narrow gauge ones. On the other hand, ''Rollböcke'' were not much used there. An interesting development of the original transporter wagon concept (with bar couplers between each wagon) was that the bar couplers were discarded in favour of connecting all standard gauge wagons directly with each other by means of their ordinary buffing and draft gear. This was tried for a few years in Sweden just before the last narrow gauge freight lines were closed in the 1980s. Special adaptors could be employed to couple a set of transporter wagons onto the end of an "ordinary" narrow gauge freight train. Continuous braking was no problem, either, as the train air line could be incorporated into the bar couplers, too. Judging from early literature, the transporter wagon idea came about in Germany sometime around 1880 or 1890 (where in fact, later, ''Rollböcke'' were used a lot more than transporters). Transporter wagons with the unique ''Heberlein'' type friction brake system were in daily use in the old GDR (East Germany) well into the late 1980s. In Britain, they were introduced to the Leek and Manifold Valley Light Railway in 1904 by Everard Calthrop, who also introduced them to the Barsi Light Railway in India of 1897. They carried the bulk of the freight traffic on the Leek and Manifold Valley. Transporter wagons are widely used to get rolling stock including locomotives from gauge-isolated branch lines to main maintenance centres. The South Australia Railways had its "Crocodile" wagon for this purpose.〔A history of the South Australia Railways - Volume 1: The early years. p214〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Transporter wagon」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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