the.com/railway
steel veins that taught the planet to keep time and conquer distance.
means A track of parallel steel rails on which trains run, and by extension the whole system of trains, stations, and services that operate along it.
from A plain compound of "rail" and "way." "Rail" came into English from Old French "reille" (a bar or rod), itself from Latin "regula," a straight stick or rule — the same root behind "regular" and "ruler." "Way" is purely Germanic, the ancient word for a road or path. So a railway is literally a "bar-road": a way made of rules laid down in iron. The term predates steam, first used for the wooden and then iron tracks that horses dragged wagons along in mines; the locomotive arrived later and borrowed the road already named for it.
- time zones
- Railways invented standardized time to stop crashes
- first line
- 1825 Stockton-Darlington hauled coal, not people
- track gauge
- Standard width traces back to Roman cart ruts
- trans-siberian
- Spans nearly 6,000 miles across eight time zones
- steel weight
- A single rail mile weighs over 100 tons
trans-siberian railway — 9,289 km route connecting moscow to vladivostok, completed 1916
orient express — luxury train running paris to istanbul since 1883
indian railways — world's largest railway network by number of stations, 7,216 total stations
gotthard base tunnel — 57 km longest railway tunnel in switzerland, opened 2016