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History. The first railway fishplate, patented by William Adams and Robert Richardson in 1847. The device was invented by William Bridges Adams [4] in May 1842, because of his dissatisfaction with the scarf joints and other systems [5] of joining rails then in use.
The fish-plates at joints need to be removed and greased annually (the requirement was relaxed to bi-annually in 1993) and where this was omitted or where ballast conditions were especially weak, buckling took place in hot weather.
A rail fastening system is a means of fixing rails to railroad ties (North America) or sleepers (British Isles, Australasia, and Africa). The terms rail anchors, tie plates, chairs and track fasteners are used to refer to parts or all of a rail fastening system.
Plate rail was an early type of rail and had an 'L' cross-section in which the flange kept an unflanged wheel on the track. The flanged rail has seen a minor revival in the 1950s, as guide bars, with the Paris Métro (Rubber-tyred metro or French Métro sur pneus) and more recently as the Guided bus.
Jointed track is made using lengths of rail, usually around 20 m (66 ft) long (in the UK) and 39 or 78 ft (12 or 24 m) long (in North America), bolted together using perforated steel plates known as fishplates (UK) or joint bars (North America).
A fish plate is a Greek pottery vessel used by western, Hellenistic Greeks during the fourth century BC. Although invented in fifth-century BC Athens, most of the corpus of surviving painted fish plates originate in Southern Italy, where fourth-century BC Greek settlers, called "Italiotes," manufactured them.
When wagons were painted red many were fitted with cast iron plates instead. From 1904 the initials changed to a large (25 in or 64 cm) painted 'GW' which was reduced to just 16 in (41 cm) in 1920. About 1937 the design returned to just a small 5 in (13 cm) 'GW' painted just above the wagon's number.
These two systems of constructing iron railways, the "L" plate-rail and the smooth edge-rail, continued to exist side by side into the early 19th century. The flanged wheel and edge-rail eventually proved its superiority and became the standard for railways.
1861 – First railway in Paraguay, from the station to the Port of Asuncion on 14 June. 1862 – The first railway in Finland, from Helsinki to Hämeenlinna. 1862 – The Warsaw – Saint Petersburg Railway is opened. 1863 – First underground railway, the 4-mile (6.4 km) Metropolitan Railway opened in London.
The Pacific Railroad Surveys (1853–1855) were a series of explorations of the American West designed to find and document possible routes for a transcontinental railroad across North America. The expeditions included surveyors, scientists, and artists and resulted in an immense body of data covering at least 400,000 square miles (1,000,000 km ...