Railway Junction

The thousand mile track laid out and traversed for days now comes to a small space where it is broken in two, with the age old dilemma of direction to pose for the oncoming train. Chuggers come often to this point, not knowing what may happen during this delicate time, but all eventually make a change or stay the course, fulfilling their promise to passengers and cargo alike to arrive at the promised destination. A junction, in the context of rail transport, is a place at which two or more rail routes converge or diverge. In a simple case where two routes with one or two tracks each meet at a junction, a fairly simple layout of tracks suffices to allow trains to transfer from one route to the other. More complicated junctions are needed to permit trains to travel in either direction after joining the new route, for example by providing a triangular track layout. In this latter case, the three points of the triangle may be given different names, for example using points of the compass as well as the name of the overall place. The world's first railway junction was Newton Junction (now Earlestown station) near Newton-le-Willows, England where, in 1831, two railways merged. This sound uses the following file from Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=117894