Insulated railway track joint
Introduction
The photograph on this page of Insulated railway track joint by Thomas Nugent as part of the Geograph project.
The Geograph project started in 2005 with the aim of publishing, organising and preserving representative images for every square kilometre of Great Britain, Ireland and the Isle of Man.
There are currently over 7.5m images from over 14,400 individuals and you can help contribute to the project by visiting https://www.geograph.org.uk
Insulated railway track joint
Image: © Thomas Nugent Taken: 6 Jul 2020
Insulated joints are used to isolate sections of track for signalling purposes. The fishplates on the sides of the rails are made of a plastic material to prevent shorting of the two sections of track which they hold together. A plastic material (in this case it's yellow) is also placed in the joint where the rails butt together (a gap is left for this purpose). Note the different coloured 'spring clips which clamp the rails to the sleepers (red and blue), the red one is the standard clip and the blue one is a 'left handed' version of it, used in this case to avoid damage to the insulated fish plate during installation or removal. See also Image Wikipedia offers further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_circuit .
Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0
Image Location
Latitude
55.853901
Longitude
-4.259764