English: Political cartoon depicting the evils of the break of gauge on the railway at Gloucester in 1846. In historical hindsight it is known that the chaotic nature of transloading at Gloucester in the 1840s was deliberately maximized as a spectacle to serve as a political weapon in the Gauge War, and that ways of mitigating it were available but were not implemented. Regardless, at the time such chaos was widely interpreted as an obvious lesson in the folly of allowing more than one gauge, and it had real impact on public opinion.