Crossovers
Images on this page have been compressed to save space and download time. Quality therefore may not be up to scratch. There may be occasion when you need two double track railways to crossover and allow trains to be able to go in any direction. Such an example of a crossover is like the one shown below:
However, if you have a busy railway then many delays will result as trains queue up, as only one train can occupy the central track at a time, which ever way they are going.
As I have said, crossovers are not nice things, and ways to make them work a lot better can be found. I have thought about this long and hard, I have come up with what I believe to be the best crossover, which works like a highway crossover, here it is:
I declare the design above to be the most efficient, because a railway going north -south for example, as you can see unloads all of its traffic before taking on new traffic. The design below is one down on the efficiency scale, because the north south railway takes on new traffic before it has unloaded all of its original traffic, meaning a train going south to east could confict with an east to north train, avoided in the design above.
If you want a more modest, cut down crossover, then a one like below can be used, although it is less efficient when there are a lot of trains. This is because, and especially when fast maglevs arrive they have to go under the track they have just come over, this means the amount of traffic flowing over the centre section is doubled, meaning possible further delays.
Of course, circumstances when such a crossover is required are likely to be low, but the design can be easily adapted to cope with a more normal situations in which only three directions are involved. Such a crossover could look like this:
For a three way situation the above
crossover is as complicated as it needs to be, although clearly
it can be altered.
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