Steel wheels on steel rails, touching over a patch smaller than a fingernail, carry five-thousand-tonne coal trains and three-hundred-and-fifty-kilometre-an-hour expresses. Run on the page and then measured: how coned wheels steer a train round a curve and why it can hunt; how track bends under a wheel and how far a curve may be canted; what forces speed a train up, hold it on a gradient and slow it down, and why it stops in kilometres, not metres; how electricity reaches a moving train; how signals and interlockings keep trains apart when drivers cannot see each other; how a timetable fits thousands of trains through the same tracks and why one late train makes others late; and how high-speed lines, heavy freight, metros and mountain railways are built. Drive the train, set the cant, signal the junction, write the timetable — every force, speed, headway and delay computed by the page.
Every train, curve and number on these pages is computed by the page or cited with its source; your progress stays in this browser. The railway is explained, never operated: the cab, signals and interlockings here are simulations, real railways run by their rule books, safety cases and certified staff, and nothing here is a reason to go onto a railway or touch its equipment. Standards appear in their teaching form with cited editions, accidents are told from their official reports, and nothing here is engineering, safety or investment advice. The course endorses no product or company: trains and companies are named only for their place in history or in a cited source. Not affiliated with or endorsed by any railway, organisation, university, publisher or author mentioned here.