Re: Why is it called "up"?

["Derick Wuen" <cullend@webone.com.au>]

Roderick Smith wrote in message <392CD885.26B8BEA0@werple.net.au>...
>Up and down match the direction of travel on a train-control graph; these
>usually have the capital city (based on UK) as the top line of the graph.
>For domestic trains in Victoria, I use up and down; for interstate trains
>I use eastbound/westbound and northbound/southbound for simplicity and
>ease of understanding.
>
>
>--
>Regards
>Roderick B Smith
>Rail News Victoria Editor
>
I think it predated the invention of train control graphs.

Think of a printed timetable with stations arranged in a column, e.g.
Liverpool at the top and Manchester at the bottom with Rainhill, Kenyon
Jnct, Sankey etc in order in between. Such timetables were posted on
noticeboards at stations from the earliest days. Now put in the times for
the trains. Trains from Liverpool to Manchester you find the times at each
station by reading "down" the columns; trains from Manchester to Liverpool
you find by reading "up" the columns.

This has nothing to do with gradients, gravity, capital cities etc. It can
also lead to anomalies such has been pointed out, and happened when the
Liverpool and Manchester, London and Birmingham, and Grand Junction railways
joined to form an intercity network. L&B down trains from London to
Liverpool would have been up trains on the L&M, and who knows what on the
GJR, the piggy in the middle.

As has been pointed out, changing local nomenclature to fit in with a more
logical network wide convention is risky, at least for a psychologically
indeterminate time.

And some of the alternatives used elsewhere are no better.

In the USA many roads were essentially built in an east-west orientation in
a network sense, and this was used as a timetable convention, and probably
more important to safeworking, as under train order systems trains have
"rights" conferred by direction e.g. westbound trains are superior to
eastbound trains of the same class, and thus eastbounds have to go into
sidings to clear the timetable for westbounds.

However, just as in Australia, local tracks on an east/west road could be
north/south orientation by the compass, e.g. branches and deviations around
mountains. So compass direction could be very different to timetable
direction. Also when roads junctioned and amalgamated, quite often the
timetable conventions adopted were out of kilter, and thus there are
numerous examples of "eastbound" timetabled trains heading in a western
compass direction etc, which our US timetable freak cousins like frothing at
the mouth about, just as we do when an up train coming down the mountains
has a prang at Glenbrook.

The French, as always, have to be different.  On their "real" railway lines
(not the Paris Metro) they have lefthand running on double tracks, and a
network which radiates from Paris. Tracks are numbered from left to right as
you face out from Paris. Track 1 is the track which leaves Paris. Trains on
track 1 have odd numbers. Track 2 "usually" is into Paris, Trains on track 2
have even numbers. Track 3 leaves Paris.... etc. The directions from and to
Paris are thus called "impair" and "pair" (odd and even). All very logical
and Gallic. But there are also cases where local conditions result in impair
trains travelling on pair tracks, and track arrangements which require, say
both tracks 1 and 2 to be impair (direction) and tracks 3 and 4 to be pair
(direction).

I know of no "directional convention" impervious to local circumstances or
network reconfiguration.

Anyway... only northern hemisphere hegemonists think that north should be up
on a map!