Regarding “switch” vs. “turnout” – I prefer to use the nomenclature defined by C. Frank Allen in “Railroad Curves and Earthwork.” Allen was professor of Railroad Engineering at M.I.T. for a long period – the book was the textbook for students in his class. First edition was 1889 – my copy is the 7th edition c. 1931. I’m unsure if there are editions after that, but since he lived from 1851 to 1948, there might be one later.

Allen defines the turnout as the entire assembly including the switch points, stock rails, closure rails, frog and guard rail. Effectively, the switch is the part of the turnout that moves (presuming that you don’t have a movable point frog).

In American street railway practice, single point switches were common, and the device opposite the switch point is the mate. The mate just provides a path for the wheel to diverge or go straight, as determined by the position of the single point. Single point switches could have the point on either side of the track – we have examples in service of both on my railway.

Regarding the book – you can occasionally find copies on Ebay and serious used book stores such as Powell’s in Portland OR. I highly recommend this book if you are involved in designing, constructing or maintaining trackwork.

D. Bower
Manager, Way and Track, Pennsylvania Trolley Museum

Fishplates, I think you would call them joint bars.

"To fish": nautical terminology for joining two parts, e.g. a broken mast, with a splint, called a "fish"

In english practice, a frog is called a crossing, and the business of assembling and maintaining turnouts and diamond crossings is known as "the switch and crossing work"

Frog: also the v shaped part of the underside of a horse's hoof.

In Colorado, we call the things that splice rails together either "angle bars" or "joint bars".

The way I heard it, "fish plates" are what they call "tie plates" in the Northeastern USA, supposedly because fish is often served on big square plates.

I can tell you that in Mexico, we use the word "rana" for either a switch frog or a rerailing frog. The word for an amphibian that jumps is used because both kinds of frog make the wheels jump over the rail.

"The way I heard it, "fish plates" are what they call "tie plates" in the Northeastern USA, supposedly because fish is often served on big square plates."

I've worked on track here in the Northeastern USA, at different places on and off since 1972, and the only time I ever heard "fishplate" was from a model railroader who joined the track crew for the day at a Connecticut heritage railroad. We all use "tie plates" and "joint bars" as the names for those things.

Howard P.

However, if you look at the L.B. Foster list of standard rail sections, you will find a column called "FISHING" which is the dimension that relates to the height of the joint bar.

Our Burlington guys (at least in Colorado) routinely call panel track "Snap Track", and track panels "track sections", even though we generally know better. Quite a few of us have HO trainsets at home, and there must be quite a few more that I don't know about, because the proper terms are almost never used.

I never heard of tie plates being confused with joint bars, but fish plates are a specific style of joint bar as are angle bars. Fish plate is another name for splice bars - an older style no longer used in modern mail-line sizes, but some older track guys I've spoken to had heard of the term. Here's a screen grab of bars from three different (US) suppliers' source books. The most common terms I hear today are the ones in the middle illustration. Note the older style isn't even shown anymore in the top one.

I have another older manual that specifically shows the plain fishplate (splice bar) style labeled as such but can't find it at the moment.

I agree that I've also seen catalogs with fishplates having no toes and just fitting in the fishing surface (web) between the head and the base of the rail. Angle bars covered a lot of the top of the base, and some even folded under it!

Do the catalogues show anything which would be the equivalent of a "junction plate", which is for joining different (as opposed to worn) rail sections together. The tricky ones are those which join bullhead rails to flatbottom, which roughly speaking change from splice plates to short toe plates in the middle.

The catalogues have Compromise Joints for connecting 2 different rail sections. Many are cast, but I've seen some that were forged or ground down from a regular bar for the larger section.