Hi,
Here is a short passage from Red Rabbit by Tom Clancy about changing gauges.
The book was published in 2002 and is set in the middle 1980's.
I hope you find this interesting, I did.
Doug vV
The train came to an unexpected halt in a yard right at the Hungarian frontier, near the town of Zombor. Zaitzev hadn't known about this, and the surprise was soon compounded. There were cranes on their side of the train, and no sooner had the train stopped than a crowd of coveralled workman appeared.
The Hungarian State Railways operated on standard gauge, the tracks 1,435 millimeters apart - 4 feet 8 1/2 inches - apart, which was the world's standard, and incongruously dated back to the two-horse chariots used by the Romans. But the Russian train was five feet, or 1,524 millimeters - for some reason no one remembered. The solution to that here was to lift the train bodies off the Russian tracks - the wheel sets - and lower them onto a different set. It took about an hour, but it was efficiently done, for all that.