Title text:
To access distant parts of the project, I ended up building a regular-scale passenger train inside each rail.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3297/
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2026
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Don’t feel bad, I still don’t understand.
Instead of building a smaller model train set (1:87 scale), they are building a giant train set (87:1 scale)
Depicted is the side view of tracks and a train wheel in the middle of construction
I think the art here is the issue.
It's (ironically enough) way out of scale. In this drawing, the rail is over twice as tall as a railroad tie is thick. In a real railroad, that should be reversed -- a rail is approximately half as tall as the thickness of a railroad tie.
Then thee is me who was thinking that it was supposed to look like: