Re: Is this WWII era spur narrow gauge?

The consensus is that transports running on the standard gauge main line reached Malkinia or Treblinka station. From there, a vaguely-described "smaller shunting engine" brought the wagons to the camps along the quarry spur. The source you cited earlier implied that the engine of the main transport shunted the wagons to the camp in groups of 20 from the woods surrounding the camp. But that is not the modern consensus, the consensus is that a separate shunting engine brought the wagons all the way from the station to the camps. The main engine did not go beyond the stations. Therefore, there is a description of an entirely different locomotive vaguely described as "smaller" than the main locomotive.

Memory can be faulty, especially in cases like these where there is no documentation or details surround the "smaller shunting engine" that actually brought the wagons to the camps. So I would not dismiss photographic documentation of the railway given a severe lack of other documentation and the unreliability of memory. It is entirely plausible that this "smaller shunting engine" was a smaller engine for a different railway that connected the stations to the quarry.

I do not see how the pictures I posted could possibly be taken from so high as to make a 4 ft 8 1/2 gauge look like a 3 ft 4 inch/meter-gauge. The two examples you have provided of standard gauge railway only adds to my confidence that the image of the quarry spur is not plausibly standard gauge. For example, here is an image of the standard gauge Malkinia-Siedlce main line:



I can see that it corresponds perfectly to the images of standard gauge railways you have shown. The Malkinia line in red (flipped) perfectly overlaps the standard gauge line in blue at the vanishing point as I would expect if they were the same width apart:



On the other hand, that railway appears significantly wider than the quarry spur in red:



It is true that we do not know the exact height at which these photos were taken (the focal length does not matter for this analysis), but I get this exact same result for a large sample of images like the ones you just posted at various angles which appear similar.

For example, it also seems clear to me that the photo on the right, a known standard gauge, is wider than the quarry spur on the left:



The angle seems very similar, so I do not see how this difference in width could be due to anything other than these rails not being the same gauge.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/16/2021 11:43PM by Loco-Motive.