branch line
1
3.9
- noun
:
línea secundaria
- We explored the scenic countryside by taking the branch line that connected the main city to the remote farms.
Examples
-
He was one of the leading figures in the Genesee and Water Street Railroad (Carson 1977, 25-26), which ran a branch line partway up the hill to within a block of the hospital and the campus.
Academic text (2012) -
A former resident of the Carolina tobacco belt, Smith had moved to Broxton, Georgia, a G&F branch line town, and he longed to better the economic lot of his community.
Academic text (2007) -
An abandoned branch line.
-
At midday, I got off at the railway junction, where the branch line to San Antonio and Santa Cruz starts.
Fiction book (1996) -
It is at the end of a branch line of the railroad—with maybe 2,000 inhabitants.
Academic text (2002) -
It took him another hour and a half to travel by a branch line and then a hired pony and trap to the country home of the late Vyvyan Etheridge.
Fiction book (1990) -
Third-class travel was cheap, but for the poorest traveler, some of the branch lines offered an even cheaper fourth-class rate in open wagons.
Academic text (1993) -
If, for example, you live in a bucolic idyll served by a meandering branch line dating back to Victorian times, your desire to use it will apparently remain undiminished amid the rise of the machines.
Blog text (25) -
When he bought heavily into the Smith River country, John Ringling had built a branch line railroad to the town of White Sulphur Springs, and about midway along that twenty-mile set of tracks happened to be Moss Agate, although you would have to guess hard at any of that now.
Fiction book (1993) -
The train diverged from the main route and traveled along the branch line to the small village.
Synonyms
16
2.8
Tracks and the ground they sit on that form a route for trains
3
2.1
A set of tracks that trains use to travel between places
1
4.8
A smaller transport route like a short train or flight that connects towns to a main city
1
6.0
A small private train route that connects local towns to main railway lines
How Big
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning of 'branch line' (a railway line that diverges from a main line) is directly derivable from combining 'branch' (a subdivision or offshoot) with 'line' (a route or railway line), so the compound transparently denotes a line that branches off. This noun+noun compositional pattern is common in English and across languages, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents would readily infer the intended meaning.
Etymology
Branch line comes from the image of a tree: a small branch growing from the main trunk. A railway line that leaves the main route to serve a small town looks like that, so branch line means 'a smaller railway that splits off from the main one'.