Editing Railroad switch (section)

=== Rack-railway switches ===
[[File:Rack railway turnout (SPB).JPG|thumb|left|[[Rack railway#Riggenbach (1871)|Railroad switch]] of the [[Schynige Platte Railway]] (at [[Schynige Platte]], Switzerland)]]

[[Rack railway|Rack-railway]] switches are as varied as rack-railway technologies. Where use of the rack is optional, as on the [[Zentralbahn]] in Switzerland or the [[West Coast Wilderness Railway]] in [[Tasmania]], it is common to place turnouts only in relatively flat areas where the rack is not needed. On systems where only the pinion is driven and the conventional rail wheels are idlers, such as the [[Dolderbahn]] in [[Zürich]], [[Štrbské Pleso railway station|Štrbské Pleso]] in [[Slovakia]] and the [[Schynige Platte]] rack railway, the rack must be continuous through the switch. The Dolderbahn switch works by bending all three rails, an operation that is performed every trip as the two trains pass in the middle. The Štrbské Pleso and Schynige Platte Strub rack system instead relies on a complex set of moving points which assemble the rack in the traversed direction and simultaneously clear the crossed direction conventional rails. In some rack systems, such as the [[Rack railway#Morgan|Morgan system]], where locomotives always have multiple driving pinions, it is possible to simplify turnouts by interrupting the rack rail, so long as the interruption is shorter than the spacing between the drive pinions on the locomotives.<ref>{{cite patent |country=US |number=772736 |inventor=John H. Morgan |title=Switching or Crossover Device for Traction Rack Rail Systems |pubdate=18 October 1904 }}</ref>

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