Westbound ICN on new flyover
Killwangen-Altstetten: SBB's funnel in Zurich

 
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Home > About this site > Terminology

Terminology

In this site, I mostly use U.S. as opposed to British English. Having lived in France in 1982-87 and in Switzerland since, I hope American readers will nevertheless forgive some compromises, including railway (instead of railroad) and transport (instead of transportation).

On the other hand, I have found no substitute for the American term, "railroading". But then again, the American term "engineer" - meaning the person at the controls of the train - is confusing for someone not familiar with U.S. railspeak, and so I prefer the British term driver.

The area of biggest divergence of British and U.S. English is for technologies such as the railway and automobile, which came into being and needed many new words at a time when the American and British populations had already been separate for a long time, but transatlantic communication was much weaker than it is today. The words for older technologies (like agriculture) and newer ones (like flight and computers) are thus much more similar in British and U.S. English than for the automobile and railway.

The railway terms of my native country are still somewhat more familiar to me than the British terms. (Although I've been in Europe since 1982, the rail magazine I read most avidly - probably because of its link to home - is the U.S. publication Trains.) I also believe that a British reader is more likely to be familiar with the U.S. terms than vice versa, and that readers from other countries are by now accustomed to dealing with the differences, especially on the web.

As for distances, in keeping with the practice of American scientists, photographers, and car makers - and almost everyone else on Earth - I use kilometers, not miles.

Some U.S. rail terms, such as "tower" are ill-adapted to Switzerland, since most Swiss interlocking plants are in stations, not in raised structures that could be called towers.

In this web site, for brevity, I call any movement of equipment along the rails a "train". Such movements include light locomotives and other self-powered units.

To make the texts easier to read, I generally refer to people with the masculine pronoun "he". I hope the many women now working in railway operations at SBB will forgive me.

The alphabetical index

The alphabetical index presents some of the German terminology for traffic control on SBB, and the English translations and other terminology I have adopted for this web site.


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This site was originally assembled in March 2001. Comments are welcome.

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