Zig zag (railway)

A railway zig zag, also called a switchback, is a method of climbing steep gradients with minimal need for tunnels and heavy earthworks. For a short distance (corresponding to the middle leg of the letter "Z"), the direction of travel is reversed, before the original direction is resumed.

A location on railways constructed by using a zig-zag alignment at which trains have to reverse direction in order to continue is a reversing station.

Zig zags tend to be cheaper to construct because the grades required are discontinuous. Civil engineers can generally find a series of shorter segments going back and forth up the side of a hill more easily and with less grading than they can a continuous grade which has to contend with the larger scale geography of the hills to be surmounted.

Zig zags suffer from a number of limitations:

If wagons in a freight train are marshalled poorly, with a light vehicle located between heavy ones (particularly with buffer couplings), the move on the middle road of a zig zag can cause derailment of the light wagon.

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