Rail & Road
A preserved railway is a charity that happens to run trains
Heritage lines exist because volunteers bought a closed route and kept it working, and that origin explains…
Rail & Road
Trains, ferries and long drives — how they actually work for a traveller.
20 articles · page 2 of 2
Rail & Road
Funiculars, racks and cables solve a gradient the wheel cannot
Above a few per cent of slope an ordinary train stops working, and the machines that take over are chosen…
Rail & Road
A frontier can change the gauge, the voltage and the way trains are signalled
Railways were built nationally before they were connected internationally, and the technical seams left by…
Rail & Road
A shared taxi leaves when it is full, and that is the whole timetable
Across much of the world the vehicle between two towns departs on load rather than on a clock, which…
Rail & Road
Passenger trains share their track with freight, and freight was there first
On a mixed railway the timetable is a compromise between services with different speeds and different…
Rail & Road
A rural bus timetable is written for schoolchildren and shoppers
Village services exist to serve a small number of fixed local needs, and once you know what those needs are…
Rail & Road
Whether a network has barriers decides how it checks your ticket
Closed systems verify at the gate and open systems verify on board, and that single architectural choice…
Rail & Road
A road number is a classification, and it predicts the drive
Numbering schemes encode who maintains a road and what standard it was built to, which makes the number on…