10 Questions: British Railways #2 Multiple Choice Quiz | World

Answer: St Pancras

When the Channel Tunnel was first opened in 1994, Eurostar's terminal station in Britain was Waterloo International. This line was too slow and inefficient, so eventually St Pancras was chosen for re-development and to be the terminal station for a new high speed line.

In 2006, CTRL (Channel Tunnel Rail Link) was renamed High Speed 1 (HS1) and in 2007, St Pancras International was officially opened after £6 billion of spending on the project. The Eurostar class 373 electric trains can reach a top speed of 186 mph; the fastest in the UK. Eurostar has terminal stations in Paris, Brussels and Lille.

Answer: Northern

The Northern line was originally two separate lines, the first of which opened in 1890. When the two lines were joined, the resulting line was called Morden-Edgware. In 1937, there was a planned expansion of the line, called Northern Heights, which is where the name for the Northern line came from.

The expansion didn't happen because of disruption caused by World War 2 and because of a change in circumstances afterwards. Altogether there are 50 stations on the Northern line, 36 of them are underground. Morden is the southernmost station; Edgware and High Barnet are the two northernmost stations on each of their branches. Of the other three lines in question, the map colours are Central red, Metropolitan purple and Bakerloo brown.

Answer: Lowestoft

Lowestoft, in the county of Suffolk, is the most easterly town in Britain and it also has the most easterly railway station. There is a train service direct to Norwich from Lowestoft via the line which goes north west through Oulton Broad North. There is also a train service direct to London Liverpool Street on the line which goes south through Oulton Broad South and which includes stations such as Ipswich, Colchester and Chelmsford.

In the year 2010, these services are operated by NXEA (National Express East Anglia).

Answer: Intercity-125 (class 43 )

Intercity 125s are high speed trains (HSTs) which were built between 1976 and 1982. They are driven by two class 43 power cars, one on each end. They are capable of reaching 148 mph, but due to line speeds they normally travel at speeds no greater than 125 mph.

Answer: Chairman of the British Railways Board

Richard Beeching was Chairman of the British Railways Board. In collusion with the government of the day, large sections of the railway network were axed all over the U.K. These closures only stopped when a new government came to power. In 1965, Richard Beeching was made a life peer in the Lords and he became deputy chairman of ICI.

Answer: 1948 to 1993

When World War 2 ended in 1945, the damage and the wear and tear to rolling stock and railway infrastructure was considerable. In order to co-ordinate the re-building and investment programmes, the new Labour government passed the Transport Act 1947 leading to the start of nationalization of the four large railway companies' assets on January 1st 1948.

Before this time, during the Second World War (1939-45), the government was in control of the railways and was run by the Minister of War Transport. This was not an actual nationalization. Further back in time, between the two world wars, the 1921 Railway Act had resulted in the merging of the 123 different railway companies into just four.

A new privatisation of the railway was instigated by a Conservative government with the Railways Act 1993. This became a franchise system with many different operators concerned with running the system for a profit, along with the subsidies they got from the government.

Answer: Four-foot

Four-foot is the area between the two running rails on any railway track. This is so named because the distance between the two rails, on a standard gauge track, is just over four feet. Its actual distance is 4 feet 8.5 inches.

If two railway lines are the normal distance apart, running in parallel, the area between them is called the six-foot.

A platform is a safer area for passengers to board and alight from the train. In the U.K. it is just below the door level of the train, so it is just a step or two down. People shouldn't stand too close to the edge of the platform when trains are passing through at speed. More on that later.

Answer: bottom

The idea behind the four-aspect signal is to give drivers of faster trains more warning of when they are approaching a red (stop) signal. Instead of a single yellow, there is first a double yellow warning and then a single yellow warning. The red light is always in the bottom head of the signal because heavy snow is more likely to block the top light from view and the stop signal is the most important.

The double yellows are separated by the green signal so that they can be clearly seen as two separate signals rather than as just one yellow. If they were too close together, they could be mistaken for a single yellow.

The order of the lights from top to bottom is yellow, green, yellow, red.

Answer: St Pancras

British artist Paul Day was commissioned to do a sculpture for St Pancras International station. He sculpted "The Meeting Place" as an embracing couple to evoke the romance of travel. This was completed in 2007 ready for the official opening of the station. "The Meeting Place" is made of bronze, is 30 feet (9 metres) high, 20 tonnes in weight, and stands at the south end upper level underneath the station clock.

The clock is a replica of the original which had been damaged in the 1970s.

Answer: Cess

The cess is the space alongside the railway line starting at the ballast shoulder and then any path area alongside it. There are minimum positions of safety advising where anybody should stand or walk. This is because a moving train drags air that is close to it along with it, creating lower pressure. The higher pressure air, behind where a person is stood, tries to move into the lower pressure thereby pushing the person towards the train. This is Bernoulli's principle. The faster the train, the greater the difference in pressures.

Also, a train isn't the same width as the track. A train is nearly 9 feet wide meaning that there is over 2 feet of train width overlapping each side of the two rails.

A gantry is a metal framework over the railway tracks for displaying various semaphore signals. A level crossing is where a road and the railway line cross over one another.