The Great Freight Yard of Maras was a supply nightmare of five incompatible rail gauges.
Giles Croft stood on the switching tower balcony. He looked out over eighty tracks of tangled iron chaos.
Down below, three hundred stevedores were manually hauling sacks of wheat from a three-foot narrow-gauge cart to a six-foot royal broad-gauge wagon.
Bales of cotton had tumbled into the mud.
Two draft mules were stuck between the diverging rails of an unsynchronized three-way stub switch.
Wagon drivers were shouting at each other in three regional dialects, waving iron pinch bars and threatening violence.
“Look at that bottleneck,” Giles said, his voice hollow with skilled agony.
He pointed his wooden ruler at the transfer shed.
