"Railway"

[Landau, James]

There is a reason both "railway" (abbreviated "RY") and "railroad" are
used so "interchageably" in the US.

Back in the "Robber Baron days", it frequently happened that when an
Iron Horse went into bankruptcy and was re-organized, the resulting
corporate entity changed its name from "XY&Z Railroad" to "XY&Z Railway"
or vice versa.  One of the lawyers on the list hopefully can tell
whether such a name change was purely cosmetic or had some kind of legal
force.

The same thing happened in the FDR Administration with airlines.  At
that time the term "airways" was frequently used for what we now call an
"airline".  Then a big scandal broke about how air-mail contracts had
been awarded in the Hoover Administration, and for a short while all
airmail was flown by the US Army Air Force.  This didn't work and the
airlines had to be let back into the airmail business, but as a
face-saving maneuver the Administration declared that none of the
scandal-marred "airways" companies was to be allowed back in the
business.  So to get back to flying airmail, American Airways changed
its name to "American Airlines" and as such was allowed to return to the
business.  Ditto for TWA (then called "Transcontinental and Western
Airways"), Eastern, and United.

Currently the word "airway" has the technical meaning of a standard
route for flights to follow between airports.

    James A. Landau
    test engineer
    Northrop-Grumman Information Technology
    8025 Black Horse Pike, Suite 300
    West Atlantic City  NJ  08232  USA


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-----Original Message-----
From: Jesse Sheidlower [mailto:jester at PANIX.COM]
Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2007 4:02 PM
Subject: Re: "Railway"

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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