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Post by Sandhurst on Oct 30, 2021 17:50:53 GMT
This information was posted by Prudent Regret at "klowns": Treblinka II Narrow-Gauge Rail; this is a discussion on the narrow gauge railway and not on anything else including the transportation, housing, accommodation of hรคftlinge; to refer to this as some have done at "klowns' is an attempt to derail.
At "klowns', the topic as interesting as it is got off to a poor start due entirely to derailing as seen in the first post by Balmoral95 with The above quote adds nothing to the discussion. I think it is worthy of discussion on this forum without the trash talk.
Prudent Regret said: - One feature of the alleged "Aktion Reinhardt" camps is that each had a narrow-gauge railroad.
Sobibor had a narrow-gauge railroad that led from the platform to Camp II, the area where luggage was sorted, and led to Camp III to the supposed gas chambers. Purportedly this railroad was created to carry sick Jews to the extermination area, but the much more obvious use would be to haul luggage and property throughout the camp as it was unloaded, sorted, deloused, stored, and transported.
- Belzec also had a narrow-gauge railroad that was used to haul clothing to some warehouses by the main line.
Treblinka is an even more interesting case. First, it's worth describing the situation of Treblinka in the rail network.
Starting from, say Warsaw: - The Warsaw -> Bialystok line reaches the Malkinia Junction.
- The Malkinia Junction intersects the Warsaw/Bialystok line and the Ostroleka/Siedlce line.
- The line south from Malkinia to Siedlce reached Treblinka village.
- A spur line was built from the Malkinia-Siedlce line southeast of the village Treblinka to penal camp Treblinka I
 As everyone knows, Treblinka I, the gravel mine, preceded Treblinka II, the extermination camp. According to wikipedia anyway, the spur that lead to Treblinka I was constructed by the owner of the gravel mine. An issue that was brought to the attention of the Axis forums and not adequately discussed was the design of that rail spur that led by TII to TI. This post was created by a user named robota: Robota postHere is the pic to which he is referring:  This picture was taken immediately in front of what is supposed to have been the gate to TII. The user does not appear to be any sort of denier, and tries to provide a couple of explanations in a later post: Here is another photo that shows a similar tracks construct with off cuts as sleepers. ... I am sure no one would consider this as track which death trains came rolling along! Another user seconds OP's opinion and claims experience in the railroad industry: Long ago, I spent the summer between my last year in High School and my first year in College working on a repair gang for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Tamping ties (sleepers), leveling track and laying steel from 7:00AM to 3:30PM was the hardest physical labor I've ever done, but I look back on that summer with pleasant memories. In any event, I learned a little about railways and loads, and have to agree with robota that the track shown in his photo does not appear capable of bearing normal freight or passenger rolling stock. Although what appear to be makeshift ties are visible, they appear of irregular size and too flimsy to support a locomotive with boxcars loaded with human cargo. My guess would lie with robota's first alternative, as it would seem needlessly redundant to construct a flimsy second set of tracks parallel to the main normal load bearing set. Regards, Kaschner Lastly the user "sallyg" seems to suggest that the spur leading to Treblinka I was standard gauge, but I do not know what he is basing this conclusion off of. The photographs of this line seem to show a narrow-gauge spur, i.e. here is another one at a different location:  Compare that to this narrow-gauge rail being constructed by the Narrow Gauge Railroad Museum, seems to be a match:  To top this off, last year the Treblinka Museum added a new artifact- a narrow gauge rail that was discovered in 2016 near the gravel pits: The Treblinka museum states: But this seems like speculation to avoid acknowledging that this is evidence the TI / TII spur was a narrow-gauge railroad. Based on visual inspection (admittedly limited when dealing with perspective in photographs), the rail appears identical in make, shape, etc. to the spurs photographed by the Soviets in 1944. The photographic and archaeological evidence suggests that the spur which connected the main Siedlce line to TI/TII was a narrow-gauge railroad. |
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Post by Prudent_Regret on Nov 1, 2021 16:42:25 GMT
Here is another key photograph of the remnants of the Treblinka spur, this image was captured c. 1964 and shows the spur leading to the Treblinka camps:  The rest of the line has been dismantled, but these rails were preserved by the road construction. On the left side of the image, you can see the main Malkinia-Siedlce line. It can be verified that the gauge of the spur leading to the Treblinka camps in this picture is narrower than the Malkinia-Siedlce line:  Other circumstantial evidence: - The aforementioned narrow-gauge track found in archaeological investigations at TI
- Witness testimony of a "smaller shunting engine" that brought the wagons to TII. Likely this "smaller shunting engine" was a narrow-gauge steam engine.
- According to the Treblinka museum, there was a narrow-gauge railway with a narrow-gauge steam engine that operated inside the gravel pit supposedly
So the museum acknowledges that there was a narrow-gauge railway with a narrow-gauge steam engine at TI. I wonder what evidence they have that brought them to that conclusion. My speculation is that there is evidence for the narrow-gauge railway servicing the camp, but the Museum decided that this steam engine only operated inside the gravel pit. More likely, this evidence fits into the broader picture of the fact that the TII spur was a narrow-gauge railway. The museum is saying the engine never left the gravel pit because if they acknowledged that it did then they would be forced to acknowledge that the spur was narrow-gauge.&np; |
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Post by Sandhurst on Nov 1, 2021 17:40:43 GMT
Railway track gauges are as follows: From ; wikiFrom Following are the factors affecting the choice of a gauge: - Traffic Condition: If the intensity of traffic on the track is likely to be more, a gauge wider than the standard gauge is suitable.
- Development of Poor Areas: The narrow gauges are laid in certain parts of the world to develop a poor area and thus link the poor area with the outside developed world.
- Cost of Track:
a. The cost of railway track is directly proportional to the width of its gauge.
b. If the fund available is not sufficient to construct a standard gauge, a metre gauge or a narrow gauge is preferred rather than to have no railways at all. - Speed of Movement:
a. The speed of a train is a function of the diameter of wheel which in turn is limited by the gauge.
b. The wheel diameter is usually about 0.75 times the gauge width and thus, the speed of a train is almost proportional to the gauge.
c. If higher speeds are to be attained, the broad gauge track is preferred to the metre gauge or narrow gauge track. - Nature of Country:
a. In mountainous country, it is advisable to have a narrow gauge of the track since it is more flexible and can be laid to a smaller radius on the curves.
b. This is the main reason why some important railways, covering thousands of kilometres, are laid with a gauge as narrow as 610 mm.
Here is a photo of a disused "metre gauge" railways line. (1067mm or 3'6")  Spur lines to quarries are often run by private companies trying to save costs, Timber mills are the same. They need to save on costs so use narrow gauge, with own engine and wagons. The tracks are not as well maintained, so main track locomotives are not authorized to use them (even if they were the same gauge. The goods are transferred to main line wagons usually at the nearest station. |
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Post by Sandhurst on Nov 1, 2021 18:56:13 GMT
There are reports of very narrow gauge rail to support "tippers" at Sobibor. These are similar to those use in coal mines to transport coal out of the mine. There were some locomotives made to use these "minecart" tracks.  In Fiji the tracks for the sugar can are not much larger than the mine cart tracks in the image above, though certainly much smaller than the metre gauge tracks.  I strongly suspect that these small tracks would have been at the quarry as well. |
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Post by Prudent_Regret on Nov 1, 2021 21:23:34 GMT
Yes, this is a good example of what a metre-gauge looks like on camera: It is perhaps mistakeable as a standard-gauge railway on camera, but we can use some rules of perspective to show how this railway corresponds to known images of the Treblinka spur. Earlier I posted a photograph of the remains of the Treblinka spur embedded in the road next to the Malkinia-Siedlce line. Here is that photograph, but I drew blue lines to represent the projection of the parallel railway to the vanishing point.  One property of parallel lines in photographs is that they will all converge to the same vanishing point in the image plane. So all lines that are parallel with each-other converge to the same vanishing point. So we can use the photograph of the metre gauge railway provided by Venatแปr as a template for a known narrow-gauge railway. Then, we take other photographs with a similar angle of view of other railways, align the vanishing points, and that allows us to compare the distance between the rails to conclude whether they are the same gauge or not. For example, take this known standard-gauge railway running by Sobibor:  What we will do is draw Blue lines representing the projection of the rails in the Sobibor photo, draw Red lines representing the projection of the narrow-gauge rail, overlay the photographs, align the vanishing points, and compare the distance between the rails. Quite clearly, as expected, the Sobibor railway ( Blue) is obviously wider than the metre-gauge railway ( Red), because when the left rail is perfectly aligned the right rail is wider for the Sobibor railway:  In Contrast, the Treblinka Spur embedded in the road in the earlier photograph ( Blue) perfectly corresponds to the metre-gauge template ( Red):  This shows that the track embedded in the road in this image c. 1964 was a metre-gauge railway and certainly of a narrower gauge than the main line. That only leaves three possibilities: - This track embedded in the road is not the&np;Treblinka Spur despite it being identified as such in various sources. The "real" track was dismantled and replaced with a narrow gauge railway.
- This track embedded in the road is the Treblinka Spur and this proves it was a narrow-gauge railway.
- This track embedded in the road is not the original spur, but it is narrow gauge like the original spur was.
In any case, the people on the Skeptic forums trying to say that this is a standard gauge railway embedded in the road leading to the Treblinka camps are objectively wrong.
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Post by Sandhurst on Nov 1, 2021 22:03:44 GMT
What the ๐คก (Klowns) think over there is of little consequence; I have read their responses to your serious discussion which very few took seriously; we on the other hand are interested in historical accuracy and so will pursue this matter. On 26 March 2020, the " Treblinka Muzeum" said the following: Narrow-gauge railway, a new artefact presented at Treblinka Museum.
This rail was discovered by scientists from the Warsaw University of Technology during archaeological works near the gravel pit in 2016. Signature Oะ3 83 IV indicates that it was manufactured by Putilov Company in St. Petersburg in 1883. In the interwar period, a gravel pit belonging to the โLublin Granite and Gravel Minesโ company was opened. A special railway siding was built, and the found rail was probably an element of the system of transporting the spoil to the siding itself. During the German occupation, the gravel pit was still in operation, however, due to labour shortages, Kreishauptmann (district mayor) of Sokoลรณw Podlaski Ernst Gramss set up a labour camp near the gravel pit. In connection with this, from summer 1941 to July 1944 mainly Polish prisoners of the Penal Labour Camp Treblinka I worked there. The gravel excavated in this place was transported by so-called cradles, i.e. trolleys driving on rails. The rail has undergone conservation and is presented in front of the Treblinka Museum building. To show the above map in perspective the google map image of the same Area is given below. The image is upturned which is why the placemark is upside down. It appears that the "narrow gauge" the museum is speaking of is not regular train tracks but just the very narrow ones for carts; this is the impression I got when I first read this. The narrow gauge at Sobibor was just that, for tippers, to be pushed by men or donkeys, horses etc Keep up the good work PR, very interesting. I am interested in the ramp in the image posted above; all this suggests there is more to this story yet to unfold. Keep on track. |
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Post by Prudent_Regret on Nov 3, 2021 4:30:05 GMT
The animations I posted earlier show that the c. 1964 "Treblinka Spur" embedded in the road leading towards the Treblinka camps was a narrow-gauge rail. An even more important image of the "Treblinka Spur" is the 1944 image of the spur taken by Soviet journalists:  This photo was taken at TII. The gate in that photograph is identified as the entrance gate to the Reception Camp of TII. Here is the source. Event date: 08/01/1944 Receipt date: 09/22/2015 Author: Alexander Kapustyansky Credit: RIA News Original: A66-6653, 35 mm slide Here's a news article about the dilapidated Thika-Nanyuki railway in Kenya, which is a story about the reconstruction work being done. This is identified as a metre-gauge railway:  This is a useful picture because the viewing angle captured by this known metre-gauge railway is very similar to the angle captured in the August 1944 image of the Treblinka spur right at the gates of TII. By aligning the vanishing points, we can see that the Treblinka Spur in the 1944 photo outside the camp also corresponds to this metre-gauge railway:  Therefore, both the August 1944 and c. 1964 images of the Treblinka spur correspond to a metre-gauge railway. |
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Nessie
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Post by Nessie on Nov 5, 2021 20:09:27 GMT
What does the gauge of the railway evidence?
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Post by Sandhurst on Nov 5, 2021 20:25:55 GMT
What does the gauge of the railway evidence? This question is irrelevant Nessie; this forum is one of history and the fact that the Treblinka Muzeum discovered railway artifacts that prove narrow gauge railway did exist. Any person with an interest in the area would find this a remarkable find and worthy of further discussion. If after discussion at some future time, people reach a conclusion or lean towards a possibility of this find relating to jรผdische internment and perhaps extermination then that is their right; but the aim is not to make a leap of faith but merely to discuss the findings as presented. This tells a story of the quarry, long before the Germans arrived in WWII, perhaps before WWI(whatever, the history was then in that time). The railway lines may or may not relate to the Holocaust but interesting either way. |
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Post by Sandhurst on Nov 7, 2021 20:13:21 GMT
The animations I posted earlier show that the c. 1964 "Treblinka Spur" embedded in the road leading towards the Treblinka camps was a narrow-gauge rail. An even more important image of the "Treblinka Spur" is the 1944 image of the spur taken by Soviet journalists Thank you for your detailed work on this PR. I have been following your thread at Klowns: Klowns. I think Oozy is asking relevant questions and the most interested of all the 'jugglers'. I am interested in the perspective of track size and the 'end point' of convergence. As you know each camera has its own kind of lens with shows a different angle if it is a 'wide angle lens" or a standard lens. In the age of old cameras and Instamatic cameras, box brownies, each camera type took a different perspective. In reality there was no such thing as a "standard lens", each manufacture had their own "uniqueness". One would not expect you to know the camera types in those images. Is it possible in your opinion that different cameras and their subsequent images could give the illusion of different converging points for railway lines?. |
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Post by Prudent_Regret on Nov 8, 2021 1:07:58 GMT
The most relevant unknown is the focal length of the lens (i.e. zoom). The focal length can indeed have significant impacts on the perspective of an image. For example, this image shows two images taken at the same angle but with different focal lengths:  You can see how the sizes of different objects appears very different based on the focal length. Again, these are taken at the same angle, even though it seems the bridge is much larger. However, that does not impact our analysis. The relative width of the rails is what we are interested in, and the focal length does not change the width of the rails from each-other relative to the rest of the images. Here are the two images overlapped with the vanishing point corresponded, and the analysis shows they are indeed the exact same gauge:  So this analysis requires no assumption of the focal length of the cameras. It works regardless of that difference. What Oozy is doing is taking photographs from completely different angles (like from standing on top of a train platform) to try to find correspondence. But the image I have provided, which is actually a similar angle as the Treblinka spur, shows that this was a metre-gauge railway. |
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blake121666
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Post by blake121666 on Nov 10, 2021 8:53:50 GMT
From the logic you are propounding, if I were to take a picture of 2 sets of parallel rails - one set inside the other and therefore that inside set is of a narrower gauge - they would create the same exact angle at vanishing point on the horizon of the picture. The sole difference between these 2 sets of rails would be the width between their rails at any point.
But we never know absolute widths in that picture and the way you are determining the vanishing points is kludgy at best. So if I were to take the picture and a copy of it, and in the first I delete the set of inside rails out of it and in the second I delete the outside rails out of that, then I could line these 2 pictures up showing that those rails are identical by sliding the wider gauge rails upward until the widths are the same in the 2. The angle is the same after all. Any width is simply the the width at a point along the legs of the angle (the rails are the legs of the angle here) going outward.
The only difference would be the vanishing point. But you don't even HAVE any vanishing point in any of these pictures.
The point is that the angle is the same for both sets of rails - and the inside set is narrower than the outside set (it actually being contained within the outer set).
So your angle comparisons are CLEARLY BOGUS comparisons.
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Post by Charles Traynor on Nov 10, 2021 22:13:30 GMT
From the logic you are propounding, if I were to take a picture of 2 sets of parallel rails - one set inside the other and therefore that inside set is of a narrower gauge - they would create the same exact angle at vanishing point on the horizon of the picture. The sole difference between these 2 sets of rails would be the width between their rails at any point. But we never know absolute widths in that picture and the way you are determining the vanishing points is kludgy at best. So if I were to take the picture and a copy of it, and in the first I delete the set of inside rails out of it and in the second I delete the outside rails out of that, then I could line these 2 pictures up showing that those rails are identical by sliding the wider gauge rails upward until the widths are the same in the 2. The angle is the same after all. Any width is simply the the width at a point along the legs of the angle going outward. The only difference would be the vanishing point. But you don't even HAVE any vanishing point in any of these pictures. The point is that the angle is the same for both sets of rails - and the inside set is narrower than the outside set (it actually being contained within the outer set). So your angle comparisons are CLEARLY BOGUS comparisons.
Good call on this one, LilGreyRabbitOfInle. If PR wants to prove his point he needs to head to Poland and take some legit photographs of the width of the tracks in question with a tape measure in clear sight.
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blake121666
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Post by blake121666 on Nov 10, 2021 23:30:18 GMT
He needs to establish a common metric between any 2 pictures. Then he can compare lengths between pictures. He instead thought he could use the camera angle to somehow determine a common metric - along with his faulty ray-tracing to a horizon (which isn't even there in his pictures). He obviously cannot do that.
And he is also implying that this museum quote from the 2nd post is either mistaken or a lie:
Why would the museum be mistaken or lie about the the main spur being of wide gauge as opposed to T1's narrow gauge rail-line in the quarry itself?
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Post by Prudent_Regret on Nov 11, 2021 2:01:45 GMT
From the logic you are propounding, if I were to take a picture of 2 sets of parallel rails - one set inside the other and therefore that inside set is of a narrower gauge - they would create the same exact angle at vanishing point on the horizon of the picture. The sole difference between these 2 sets of rails would be the width between their rails at any point. I don't get your point. Yes, all parallel lines converge to the same vanishing point. But they don't have the same angle at the vanishing point, as that angle would be wider for the wider rails. Here is an example:  The "European Standard (1435mm)" in red clearly forms a wider angle at the vanishing point than the inner, narrow-gauge identified in blue. There is no way you could crop or rescale the narrow-gauge rail to make it match the European standard gauge. Parallel lines do not work that way. But we never know absolute widths in that picture and the way you are determining the vanishing points is kludgy at best. So if I were to take the picture and a copy of it, and in the first I delete the set of inside rails out of it and in the second I delete the outside rails out of that, then I could line these 2 pictures up showing that those rails are identical by sliding the wider gauge rails upward until the widths are the same in the 2. The angle is the same after all. Any width is simply the the width at a point along the legs of the angle (the rails are the legs of the angle here) going outward. The only difference would be the vanishing point. But you don't even HAVE any vanishing point in any of these pictures.The point is that the angle is the same for both sets of rails - and the inside set is narrower than the outside set (it actually being contained within the outer set). So your angle comparisons are CLEARLY BOGUS comparisons. I think you're pretty confused as none of what you are saying is making any sense. How is the way I am determining the vanishing points "kudgy?" Do you know what a vanishing point is? Here's the wikipedia article on vanishing points. You can even see an image the article uses as the canonical example for "vanishing point": "A vanishing point can be seen at the far end of this railroad." It's not complicated to find the vanishing point of parallel lines, and they are in the photographs. We do know the absolute widths by using references image containing railways of a known gauge. 1435mm is a standard gauge rail. So using a photograph of a known standard-gauge railway, like the one running through Birkenau, is a valid point of comparison. I do not have to go to Poland to know that "standard gauge" is 1435mm width. For example, here is a picture of the track at Birkenau, which is a standard gauge:  Here is a another picture of a known standard-gauge railway from the same angle, this one is in Tanzania:  I don't need to go to Poland or Tanzania to measure these, unless you for some reason doubt the sources that say they are standard gauges. And they do have the exact same angle at the vanishing point, showing they are the same gauge as expected.  In fact, this image at Birkenau was also taken in a nearly-identical angle-of-view of the Treblinka spur in August 1944. Here they are side-by-side:  It's pretty clear from this that the Birkenau railway is wider than the Treblinka spur. But we can still align the vanishing points and show that the Treblinka spur has a narrower angle, showing that it is a narrower gauge:  In short, your criticisms don't make any sense. This analysis is valid and it shows that the Treblinka spur was a narrow-gauge railway. |
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