"Railway"

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 12:45:46PM -0500, Wilson Gray wrote:
> Jesse Sheidlower writes:
>
> ' ... [P]erhaps even the use of "railway" is odd for an American source."
>
> FWIW, "railway" sounds okay to me. It actually appears to be used
> interchangeably. E.g., the Texas & Pacific Railway (the "T&P") is a
> unit of the Missouri-Pacific Railroad (the "MoPac"). My father once
> "ran on the road" on the Sunshine Special, a MoPac-T&P train
> celebrated in a blues by Blind Lemon Jefferson.

Both _railway_ and _railroad_ are in use in Britain and
America, but there's a distinct preference for the former in
the former and the latter in the latter. Ben Zimmer ran some
numbers in the Oxford Corpus demonstrating this connection
clearly. I think this is an interesting pair to compare,
because it's not the sort of binary thing where the forms are
totally different (e.g. _windscreen_ and _boot_ are almost
exclusively British, and _windshield_ and _trunk_ almost
exclusively American), but there's more of a flow. Yet within
this flow, the pattern is pretty clear.

Also, it seems to be the case that in America _railway_ is
limited to reference to railway companies, as in your
examples, whereas in Britain it's used more broadly.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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