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The Information Resource for Railway Systems

The Railway Technical Website is an information resource with articles about railways around the world, covering technical, operational, maintenance and financial issues. The site is maintained by Piers Connor of PRC Rail Consulting Ltd. We have included a wide range of subjects - systems, design, operation, planning, finance, engineering, production and maintenance. Both technical and operation aspects are covered. There's plenty of pictures and graphics and links to other relevant sites. In the articles, we use the UK railway system as the base technology but there are also descriptions and information about other systems around the world. Articles and glossaries are provided for a range of subjects.

The Railway as a System

A railway is a system. It comprises many parts that fit together to make the system work. If any of the parts fail to operate correctly, the system will quickly stop functioning and the railway’s customers, both freight and passengers, will see a deterioration in the service provided.

Figure 1: A diagram demonstrating the principles of the system of a railway. After an original by F. Schmid.

Updates

We update the site regularly. Currently, we are giving the site a design upgrade and we have changed the server and the tag to ".org" because of the ever rising costs of our previous server provider. and site updates are listed on our Updates Page.

What We Offer

We include a wide range of subjects - planning, finance, operation, design, systems, engineering, production and maintenance. Both technical and operation aspects are covered. There's plenty of pictures and graphics. There is also some information about steam locomotives, including a steam glossary and an explanation of locomotive wheel arrangement descriptions.

In our articles, we use the UK railway system as the base technology but there are also articles and information about other systems, like the US, as appropriate. Articles and glossaries are provided for a range of subjects.

Using the site

Navigation....

The main subjects are listed in the left hand link column. Subjects listed as "....Pages" have several pages covering various aspects of that subject.

Diagrams like this one are provided throughout the articles to show sections of infrastructure, plans of stations, railway signs, signals, features and how equipment works. This diagram is an sample schematic of the pneumatic auxiliary equipment on a train and is described fully in an article on this site here.

Site Map....

A full list of all pages on this site is provided on our Site Map.

Links....

..... are provided on this links page to take you to a number of sites with specialist information in many countries around the world including the USA, France, Germany, Japan, Spain and the UK. Click on this photo and it will take you to a page of links about High Speed Trains.

Contributions

A number of contributors have already provided excellent articles and photos for this site, and we will be pleased to consider new material for publication here.