Personally I think that these stories are true. But I found on one of the BWMA sites (I will check when home) the following propaganda: French railway engineers do not use the 1435 or 1430 mm size but but 4 ft 8.5 in or in French 4 pieds 8,5 pouces. I think that this is an enormous lie. Why should they? The metric value is more rational than the ifp one. If this were true the situation would really be desperate. In the sixties and seventies the French were experimenting with the Aerotrain, a train driven by one or more turboprops on a special elevated rail, speeds up to 300 km/h. It came to nothing in the end. In a Dutch magazine I read that a group of English journalists and other people were invited to have a ride on this turboprop-train. They were astonished that the speed was given in mph. When I read that I shuddered with revulsion (that was about 30 years ago). There are two possibilities: they had one ifp train and the rest was metric; or they really used ifp for this project. In that case, it must have been an offspring from the aviation industry which proudly has been flying the ifp banner for decades (That Airbus site which was discussed recently is sadly enough proof for it). THAT would have been a jewel for the BWMA indeed. BTW: The High Speed Trains in Europe are all metric.
