Talk:Permanent way

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The rail track page contains a number of mistakes and needed enhancing. It is mostly north American oriented and some comments against this have been made, so I have provided this page. There needs to be a lot more written here which I will try to provide over the next couple of weeks. Any comments meantime are welcome. When this page is respectable I will link it from the rail track page and remove the British references from there. Afterbrunel 16:49, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

I've done a few cleanups on this page, but it is still full of unexplained jargon.  BRIANTIST  (talk) 10:15, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Points and crossings

I noticed that you have called these switches and crossings. Is this now current British usage? When did this change to the American terms? In Australia it is a mix of terms due to historical developments. A good example is in South Australia, on the tram system they are called points and on the railways switches (they were called points up until the 1930s). Ozdaren 22:05, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

As far as I am aware, they are still officially known as points (UK), switches (US), or turnouts (modelling - both locales) regards, Lynbarn 18:33, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
although looking for something else, I have coincidentally just found a reference to "switch" in an Ordnance Survey surveying manual of 1905, so maybe the terms were more interchangable than I had imagined! [OS Website] Lynbarn 20:39, 28 September 2007 (UTC)