A closer look
French railway operator SNCF spent fifteen billion euros on a fleet of new commuter trains in 2014, only to discover they were too wide for twelve hundred regional station platforms. They forgot that older stations were built narrower, requiring an additional fifty million euros just to shave down the platform edges so the shiny new trains could actually fit. It turns out that measuring things before buying billions of dollars worth of metal is a concept that eludes even the most sophisticated European infrastructure planners, giving all of us who buy wrong-sized IKEA furniture a reason to feel significantly better about our own life choices
