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A right-hand railroad switch with point indicator pointing to right Animated diagram of a right-hand railroad switch. Rail track A divides into two: track B (the straight track) and track C (the diverging track); note that the green line represents direction of travel only, the black lines represent fixed portions of track, and the red lines depict the moving components.
Rail transport terms are a form of technical terminology applied to railways. Although many terms are uniform across different nations and companies, they are by no means universal, with differences often originating from parallel development of rail transport systems in different parts of the world, and in the national origins of the engineers and managers who built the inaugural rail ...
The practice of uncoupling a locomotive from a car in motion and running over a switch, whereupon an employee on the ground lines the switch to divert the car onto an adjacent track. [ 115 ] [ 116 ] Once commonplace, this practice has led to several lawsuits against railroad companies and is now strictly prohibited due to the high risk to life ...
Other systems which rely on the rack for driving (with the conventional rail wheels undriven) such as the Dolderbahn in Zürich, Štrbské Pleso in Slovakia and the Schynige Platte rack railway instead must switch the rack rail. The Dolderbahn switch works by bending all three rails, an operation that is performed every trip as the two trains ...
The point machine (in this case an electric motor) and associated mechanism used to operate this switch can be seen to the right in the picture. A point machine (also known as a point motor, switch machine or switch motor) is a device for operating railway turnouts especially at a distance.
Broadly speaking, reciprocal switching occurs when a shipper has access to one freight railroad but wants access to use a nearby competin The Itch To Switch: Railroad Swapping In Canada Vs. The US
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The railroad then developed a more effective system consisting of wooden balls, painted red, white or black, and hoisted up or down a pole on a rope-and-pulley system. The initial use of these signals was merely to indicate the on-time status of trains, rather than to control train movements.