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Railroad directions are used to describe train directions on railroad systems.

Contents 1 British 2 China 3 United States 4 References

In British practice, railway directions are usually described as up and down, with up being towards a major location. This convention extends to not only the trains and the tracks, but also to lineside equipment, and areas near the track. Since British trains run on the left, the up side of a line is on the left when proceeding in the up direction. The names originate from the early railways, where trains would run up the hills to the mines, and down to the ports.

On the majority of the network, up is the direction towards London. In most of Scotland, with the exception of the West and East Coast Main Lines, up is towards Edinburgh. The Valley Lines network around Cardiff has its own peculiar usage, relating to the original meaning of travelling "up" and "down" the valley.

On the London Underground, geographic direction naming generally prevails (eg "Eastbound", "Westbound"), except on the Circle Line, where the terms are "Inner Rail" (anticlockwise), and "Outer Rail" (clockwise).

In China, railway directions are described as "up" (上行) and "down" (下行), with up towards Beijing, train leave Beijing are "down", while arrive are "up". For railways not connected with Beijing, use north and west as "up" and east and south as "down". The odd train code used for "up" trains, while even used for "down", for example, train coded T27 from Beijing west to Lhasa is "down" (leave Beijing) since 27 is odd. Another example, train from Harbin to Shanghai use two codes, since in the Harbin-Tianjin sect, the train run toward Beijing, but not in Tianjin-Shanghai sect.^[1]

Most railroads in the U.S. use cardinal directions to describe the directions that lines on their systems run, although these directions often differ from actual compass directions.

Typically an entire railroad system (the lines of a railroad or a related group of railroads) will describe all of its lines by only two directions, either west and east or north and south. This greatly reduces the possibility of misunderstanding the direction in which a train is travelling as it traverses lines they may twist and turn or even reverse direction for a distance. These directions also have meaning in conflicts between trains running in opposite directions. For example, many railroads specify that trains of equal class running east are superior to those running west. This means that, if two trains are approaching a passing siding on a single-track line, the inferior westbound train must "take the siding" and wait there for the superior eastbound train to pass.

These directions are often referred to as "railroad" north, south, east or west to remove ambiguity with the same compass directions.

1. ^ http://www.railwaysofchina.com/train_number.htm