What is This?

New food trays for the homeless....

Kneeling stools

Solar waffle irons.

Row house entrances for underground dwellers....

Railway sleepers?

Close enough. The tie pad was what caught my eye.

The RR has dropped a huge stash of them in my fair city. They're rebuilding a siding, or spur.

The concrete "sleeper" is common enough, but this tie pad seems to be all plastic.

Really, you Brits and your whimsical names for things, such as railroad ties.

Are the plastic pads to reduce noise?

Since you asked:

WARNING: I got a virus alert when I went to the web site. Prestige Track web sites all seem to be infected.

I have removed the link from which the information below was copied.

Thanks. It's amazing where the viruses are hidden. I had a dangerous one blocked when i looked for Emerald Scorpion on Animal World Encyclo. Another was attached to the Google image search result for the claymore image that was a CR4 What Is It. I wonder if in this instance it the company's opposition that that has infected them. :-(

Jim

Whimsical be damned. They are railway sleepers this side of the pond.

Well, I'll give you and George Stephenson that one.

And so you should!

OK, but lorry????

I must agree there Lyn...I'll "have no truck" with the word lorry.

I am not an etymologist nor I hope a pedant but lorry comes from the Old English word "lurry" (Saxon as opposed to Viking root) meaning "to drag or tug" a load. Truck probably comes via truckle (originally Latin but came into English via Norman French) which is a wheel or pulley and was shortened to it's present form in the 15th century in the context of a four wheeled wooden carriage for a naval cannon.

This reminds me of a quotation attributed to the Irish writer and playwright George Bernard Shaw (although not found in any of his writings) "England and America are two countries separated by the same language."

I would complain that Americans can't spell but most young people in UK can't spell either which has totally deflated any smugness I might once have had.

The word "sleeper" and the word "slab" both come from the same old Norse root. It first seems to have been used around Newcastle England where many of the local dialect words are based on Norse, a legacy of the Viking occupation of that part of England in AD793. Sleeper appears in a written document for the first time in 1793. George Stephenson grew up and initially worked in the Newcastle / Darlington area before gaining fame as a railway engineer by building the first intercity passenger railway between Liverpool and Manchester (opened in 1830). Because of his influence on early railway building the local dialect term he would have used for the cross timers that support railway lines has passed into the language world wide. Americans, jealous that they did not have a language of their own, invented a new (whimsical) term for sleepers.

I assume that the term "tie" or "cross tie" referred to the function of tying the two rails together at the proper gauge.

These plastic pads seem to only replace the plate between the tie and the rail. Whatever they are attached to would be the sleeper, IMH, uninformed O.

When I was young the Brits would have called it "Ties Railroad".

Stepping stones to spread the load of maintenance personnel walking across a fragile roof.

Oooooooh! That would be telling!

Definitely portable crime scene evidence protection stepping pads or definitely portable disinfectant footpads for foot & mouth zone isolation... but never never likely to be any use as sleeper railtrack support shoes.....!

Cooler box lids awaiting assembly.

Wait, aren't they already attached to the cooler?