Young Curly Blonde Girl Changes The Railroad Switch On The Railway Track

Rack railway switches are as varied as rack railway technologies. Where use of the rack is optional, as on the Zentralbahn in Switzerland or the West Coast Wilderness Railway in Tasmania, it is common to place turnouts only in relatively flat areas where the rack is not needed. On systems where only the pinion is driven and the conventional rail wheels are idlers, such as the Dolderbahn in Zurich, Štrbské Pleso in Slovakia and the Schynige Platte rack railway, the rack must be continuous through the switch. The Dolderbahn switch works by bending all three rails, an operation that is performed every trip as the two trains pass in the middle. The Štrbské Pleso and Schynige Platte Strub rack system instead relies on a complex set of moving points which assemble the rack in the traversed direction and simultaneously clear the crossed direction conventional rails. In some rack systems, such as the Morgan system, where locomotives always have multiple driving pinions, it is possible to simplify turnouts by interrupting the rack rail, so long as the interruption is shorter than the spacing between the drive pinions on the locomotives.
• Switch diamond
Although not strictly speaking a turnout, a switch diamond is an active trackwork assembly used where the crossing angle between two tracks is too shallow for totally passive trackwork- the unguided sections of each rail would overlap. These vaguely resemble two standard points assembled very closely toe-to-toe. These would also often utilise swingnose crossings at the outer ends to ensure complete wheel support in the same way as provided on shallow angle turnouts. In North America these are known as Movable-Point Diamonds. In the UK, where the angle of divergence is shallower than 1 in 8 (centre-line measure) a switched diamond will be found rather than a passive or fixed diamond.
Such switches are usually implemented on the basis of increasing the safe crossing speed. Open blades impose a speed restriction due to the potential of the crossing impact fracturing the rail. Remember that both wheels on an axle hit the crossing gaps almost simultaneously. Switching the blades like the photo shows allows a much higher speed across the gap.