OVS Flatbottom
Member
A forty foot wide train would certainly be impressive... Realistically I can't imagine it would be practical building a rail line to that gauge from Asia to Europe. And the delays of transhipping would mean there would be no point in building a short line across suez, given the canal already exists.
There are all sorts of ways that railway technology would change and potentially stop working with a wider gauge. For a start the axle load would be much more, so you'd need multiple wheels or fatter wheels running on wider rails. The tightest practicable curve is also a certain number multiplied by the track gauge, so wide-gauge railways would be much less flexible in terms of alignment. It's been said that Hitler's broad gauge railways were totally impracticable, and the engineer tasked with designing them knew that, but given the alternatives I assume they preferred to carry on working on it.
I believe I once read that there was a rail-based proposal for the Suez isthmus in the 19th century, before the canal was constructed, which involved a whole series of parallel standard-gauge tracks carrying a cradle into which the entire ship was loaded, hauled by what would presumably have been a small fleet of steam locos for each vessel. (Predictably, it got nowhere, even at a time when ships were much, much smaller.) I can't find reference to this online, but I think it's mentioned in Durrant's book Steam in Africa.