Bonus question: how much of this infrastructure is still functional? Because the bit at the very end seems to have been turned into flower planters, on every platform at this station.
What a beautiful station
They’re brakes to slow a train that fails to stop. It hits the buffers first – those are set to slide along the rails with a certain amount of friction. Then the sliding buffers hit those red things one by one, each adding progressively more friction & hopefully stopping the train before it runs out of track.
I always assumed they are counter-measures to stop the trains should they overshoot. Bradford interchange isn’t it?
Not a railway enthusiast but they’re locking the rails together to stop them spreading outwards with the (many tons) weight of the train. The rails would splay outwards if they didn’t have these braces in place.
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Bonus question: how much of this infrastructure is still functional? Because the bit at the very end seems to have been turned into flower planters, on every platform at this station.
What a beautiful station
They’re brakes to slow a train that fails to stop. It hits the buffers first – those are set to slide along the rails with a certain amount of friction. Then the sliding buffers hit those red things one by one, each adding progressively more friction & hopefully stopping the train before it runs out of track.
You can see a similar design in the image at the top of the Wikipedia page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffer_stop
I always assumed they are counter-measures to stop the trains should they overshoot. Bradford interchange isn’t it?
Not a railway enthusiast but they’re locking the rails together to stop them spreading outwards with the (many tons) weight of the train. The rails would splay outwards if they didn’t have these braces in place.