What started this ridiculous craze for saying "train station" instead of "railway station"?

@NankerPhelge They would sound pretentious today, over half a century later. Language changes. Back then, if a woman was pregnant, people said she was "expecting." That would sound weird today too.

But feel free to carry on. I'm sure all the cool cats are hep to your bop lingo and the dames are all back at your pad. Peace, man.

@LeopoldBloom Language seldom, if ever, changes for the better. It's like everything else. Change doesn't do people any favours.

@NankerPhelge I don't put a value on language changing unless it obfuscates meaning. For example, "unique" means "one of a kind." So something can't be "very unique" because it's either unique or it isn't. But people say "very unique" when they mean "unusual." So when "unique" is used correctly, people might misunderstand it. Same with stupid words like "firstables" or "irregardless."

As for "train" vs. "railway," who cares. The train is the thing that goes on the railway, but both are in the station so I don't see this change as being significant.

@NankerPhelge "Homeward Bound" was the first thing I thought about when I saw your post.

@SW-User Ah, but those were two Americans writing songs in their own country and language.

You've also given us another transAtlantic difference: it's "different from" in British English.

And a third, an odd one. The Underground railways in UK cities are not called "subways", which are instead usually- pedestrian tunnels under roads or railways, etc.; and their vehicles are "trains" never trams.

Also, what we Britons call "trams" possibly after their American inventor Outram, are "street cars" in America! I say "possibly" because "tramway" or "tram-road" was also once used in some parts of England, for the internal railways in quarries and mines. Those "trams" were the wagons used to haul the produce, horse-drawn for centuries. They were not passenger vehicles.

@ArishMell interesting background info

@Piper What about the hundreds of thousands of people who bought Simon and Garfunkel's "Homeward Bound" single (a top 10 hit in the States)? Every time those people played it they would hear "railway station" in the lyrics, not "train station".

@NankerPhelge No one actually cared what Paul Simon called it?

@NankerPhelge What about that, exactly? Although I did not buy a "single" of that song, it is on at least one Simon and Garfunkel album I did buy and still have. Really good song, as are so very many they wrote and or released.
I think saying railway station is just fine, and just said that here, more people than not do actually say train station...and that it isn't any new kind of "craze". 😐

@NankerPhelge railway station seems a better rhyme for destination than train station considering the rhythm and flow of the song

@tindrummer I don't see where rhyme enters into it. Rhythm and flow, yes. Rhyme? I don't think so.

@NankerPhelge ok

@ArishMell As an American who was born and raised in Canada, I am often aghast at my countrymen's bastardization of the Queen's English but I am also cognizant of the many foolish rules included in the perfunctory use of English. As a child in school I was prone to ask our Teachers things like; if the plural of mouse is mice, why isn't the plural of house hice? With similar questions as pertained to goose/geese, moose/meese and they were never able to come up with logical answers except to tell me to be quiet and behave lest I warrant a visit to the Principal's discipline parade. What I have noticed from us is a reduction in the unnecessary over-complication of the language for simple words like favour, glamour and neighbour in removing the unnecessary "u" and yes, while we have done this with many words, I can admit that I myself find it difficult to do so. The Internet and chat have further reduced it even more to the point now where emojiis and abbreviations seem to be acceptable and IT words are now in the Oxford Dictionary too. I think old dinosaurs like us will go the way of the dodo as these things have not only become common practice but are even taught in our schools by Millennials who've become Teachers. As Bob Dylan sang, "The times they are a changin'..." and there's not a lot we can do about it...

@spjennifer Why are empty properties called "lots"? If I told someone that the empty property at number 67 is for sale and I said "there's a lot for sale over there", the reply would most probably be "a lot of what?".

@NankerPhelge More than likely it was due to large properties being divided up into smaller "lots" for sale but plot and tract is also used here.

@Really BoJo is an ass. I couldn't care less what he thinks.

@NankerPhelge You're not cousins?

@Really What are you trying to say?

@ElwoodBlues OK, I'll ask again. Why did Simon and Garfunkel call it a railway station (and not a train station) in the song "Homeward Bound"?

@NankerPhelge To fit the meter & rhyme of the song.

Same reason Dylan called it a 'train line' here:

Mona tried to tell me
To stay away from the train line
She said that all the railroad men
Just drink up your blood like wine
An’ I said, “Oh, I didn’t know that
But then again, there’s only one I’ve met
An’ he just smoked my eyelids
An’ punched my cigarette”

Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again

@ElwoodBlues @NankerPhelge Although this might not have been among his biggest "hits", Jimi Hendrix was almost surely listened to and appreciated by those other than but including Americans.
[media=https://youtu.be/EX5phFmbrU8]

@ArishMell I can well believe that about Tony Blair. Thanks for telling me that was who was responsible for that mathematical mess.

@NankerPhelge Well, it was already a mathematical mess, but Blair seemed to have disliked England and worshipped the USA anyway, so perhaps it's not surprising he foisted 10^9 and 19^12 incorrectly on us. Or perhaps he simply did not understand what the "bi" and "tri" syllables actually meant: [10^6]^2 and [10^6]^3.

@ArishMell Why did Blair dislike England so much? Telling me that has lowered my opinion of him even further than before, and I've already hated him for nigh on 20 years.

@Lyfis2live We've always said "bus station", but not "train station" during my younger days.

@NankerPhelge Count me in that 'we', the people...

@Really "Hamburger" won't count because that is something named in its native country. Just as with words like "bungalow" and "pasta", albeit the former Anglicised.

Unlike "train station", a phrase coined in a country that did not invent the railways! (They like to do that: adopt inventions from elsewhere but change the terminology to disguise the fact!)

@ArishMell This is a VERY silly thread and neither you nor I is helping.
Please don't suggest that 'is helping' should be 'are', or 'am', helping !

@Really LOL!

If I type anything fairly long I spend nearly as much time correcting clumsy typing errors as I do putting the words down in the first place...

@smiler2012 Smiler, have you ever been lost in a Forest ?

@smiler2012 He probably calls the Glenfinnan viaduct the Harry Potter bridge.

@Nimbus Have you ever been lost in the deep thundermould of the complicaden forry?

@TheThinker I haven't been to Potters Bar myself and the last time I saw it in the news was when there was a railway accident there about 20 years ago. Even then, I don't remember seeing a picture of it in the paper with that silly "Train Station" on it.

@NankerPhelge I first visited the town in late 2015 and it was like that then. No idea when that sign was put up.

Note that the Google Maps tag has it correctly as "Railway"!

Yes, there's a small memorial garden for the victims of the crash just off to the left of the original picture. Here it is:

@TheThinker This post has been the first I've seen about Potters Bar since the 2002 accident.

@ChipmunkErnie So why did Simon and Garfunkel call it a railway station in their 1966 hit song "Homeward Bound"?

@NankerPhelge Sheer arrogance? Too many English Lit classes? Unrelieved pretentiousness?

@ChipmunkErnie Nonsense.

@TheOneyouwerewarnedabout So you think trains didn't stop there in 1966?

@NankerPhelge you never been to the plane station? 🤔

@TheOneyouwerewarnedabout No, because I haven't been anywhere by plane.

@NankerPhelge
I forget how much you guys love perfect diction and typing. Let me fix that for you.

sorry I was so distracted, and hit a wrong key
The decline in trains is sad really. We once had a mighty network.The railways had to be partly nationalized just to keep them existing for passengers. We still run a LOT of freight

@Dshhh How did the passenger services decline?

@NankerPhelge after world war two, there was a real conspiracy, proved in court by elements of the American industrial complex
Standard oil, General motors Firestone tires Philips petroleum, Mack manufacturing and others, formed holding companies that bought up many US Railroad companies especially the interurban and electric ones, then deferred maintenance even ripping out the tracks , on these lines degrading the services, to a point of great dissatisfaction
these same companies were brought to court , found guilty of monopolistic practices and fined $5000
the lead treasurer of this operation was fined $1.They were allowed to continue this process

here is a more detailed take, pardon the youth of the presenter, I have fact checked this to a deep degree.

[media=https://youtu.be/oOttvpjJvAo=522]

@revenant No, it doesn't.

@Martinette OMG don't you start as well.

@NankerPhelge What is wrong with saying "train station"?

@in10RjFox They are not the same thing.

@canusernamebemyusername No, it's not.

@jshm2 I haven't been convinced of that, partly because the American duo Simon and Garfunkel called it a railway station in their hit song "Homeward Bound", and partly because the English town Potters Bar calls it a train station for some unexplained reason.

When I was growing up you could still see one of these standing in the terminus at the end of its run; stand within a foot of it feeling the incredible heat it radiated and breathing the heady mixture of steam, hot oil and sulf(ph)urous smoke that surrounded it.


My nostalgia for those days and those machines is huge, but - 'railway' vs 'railroad' - who cares (apart from yourself)?

@Really My question is not about "railway" versus "railroad", it's about "railway station" versus "train station". Of course, you already know that.

@Morvoren I am more bothered about blocking argumentative trolls like you. Go away.