4. “Low hills closed in on either side as the
train eventually crawled on to high,
tabletop grasslands creased with snow.
Birds flew at window level. I could see
lakes of an unreal cobalt blue to the north.
The train pulled into a sprawling rail
yard: the Kazakh side of the Kazakhstan-
China border.
...
5. “Workers unhitched the cars, lifted them,
one by one, ten feet high with giant jacks,
and replaced the wide-gauge Russian
undercarriages with narrower ones for
the Chinese tracks. Russian gauges, still
in use throughout the former Soviet
Union, are wider than the world standard.
The idea was to the prevent invaders from
entering Russia by train. The changeover
took hours.”
— Robert D. Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth