railway

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. A railroad, especially one operated over a limited area: a commuter railway.
2. n. A track providing a runway for wheeled equipment.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. In mech. engin., broadly, a way composed of one or more rails, or lines of rails, for the support, and commonly also for the direction of the motion, of a body carried on wheels adapted to roll on the rail or rails, or lines of rails. The wheels of railway-cars are now more usually flanged; but in railways forming parts of machines they are sometimes grooved, or they may run in grooves formed in the rails.
2. n. A way for the transportation of freight or passengers, or both, in which vehicles with flanged or grooved wheels are drawn or propelled on one or more lines of rails that support the wheels of the vehicles, and guide their course by the lateral pressure of the rails against the wheels; a railroad. (See railroad.) The parts of an ordinary passenger- and freight-railway proper are the road-bed, ballast, sleepers, rails, rail-chairs, splices, spikes, switches and switch mechanism, collectively called permanent way, and the signals; but in common and accepted usage the meaning of the terms railway and rail-road has been extended to include not only the permanent way, but everything necessary to its operation, as the rolling-stock and buildings, including stations, warehouses, round-houses, locomotive-shops, car-shops, and repair-shops, and also all other property of the operating company, as stocks, bonds, and other securities. Most existing railways employ steam-locomotives; but systems of propulsion by endless wire ropes or cables, by electric locomotives, and by electromotors placed on individual cars to which electricity generated by dynamos at suitable stations is supplied from electrical conductors extending along the line, or from storage-batteries carried by the cars, have recently made notable progress. Horse-railways or tramways, in which the cars are drawn by horses or mules, are also extensively used for local passenger and freight traffic; but in many places such railways are now being supplanted by electric or cable systems.
3. n. A railway in which cars are drawn by pneumatic locomotives. Scarcely more success has been reached in this method than in that described above.
4. n. pl. Naut., iron jackstays bolted on the under side of standing gaffs which carry fore-and-aft sails, with or without booms. Small grooved iron shapes called “travelers” are sewed to the head of the sail, and slide along the railway, so that the canvas may be spread along the gaff by means of a whip or outhaul.
5. n. A railway built under enactments to secure light charges for transportation.
6. n. A short track upon which cars are run, generally by gravity, and which passes through artificial scenery intended to be beautiful or weird: a source of amusement at pleasure-resorts.

Wiktionary

1. n. A track, consisting of parallel rails, over which wheeled vehicles may travel.
2. n. A transport system using these rails used to move passengers or goods.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. line that is the commercial organization responsible for operating a system of transportation for trains that pull passengers or freight
2. n. a line of track providing a runway for wheels