Christian Gründler hat geschrieben:Manfred Kätzler hat geschrieben:Fahrdienstleiter = station master (as far as I know)
In english literature I found only the word "signalman"; there seem to be no special words for "Fahrdienstleiter" and "Wärter".
The distinction between "Fahrdienstleiter" and "Wärter" is kompletely unknown in the English-speaking world. Same is true for the distinction between "Befehlsstellwerk" and "Wärterstellwerk". In BE, the most appropriate translation of "Fahrdienstleiter" is signalman. A signalman does the work of a "Fahrdienstleiter" but only for his own signalbox.
In North America, the situation is completely different. There, the work of a "Fahrdienstleiter" has always been done by the dispatcher. The dispatcher is not just a traffic regulator (as people sometimes call dispatchers in Europe), he is in charge for safe movement control. Local operators (e.g. on interlocking towers) are in some way only the lengthened arms of the dispatcher to set up routes, clear signals, and transmit orders in compliance with the dispatcher's instructions. Local controllers in the sense of a German "Fahrdienstleiter" or a British signalman never existed. However, big terminals are sometimes separated from the control area of the central dispatcher and controlled by a local controller called a "train director".
The key point that always leads to misunderstandings between the German-speaking and the English-speaking railway world, is that the German "Bahnhof" has no expression in the English-speaking world. Even a translation is impossible. A "Bahnhof" is quite different from the traditional British station limits. The station limits are always associated with a signalbox while a "Bahnhof" is associated with a track layout that may contain several signal boxes. I discussed these problems in my textbook
"Railway Operation and Control" which tries to give more generic view on railway operation without concentrating on a national operating philosophy but which cannot ignore the national philosophies completely.
On
http://joernpachl.gmxhome.de/glossary.htm I run both an Engish (mainly based on AE but also including a number of BE terms) and a German glossary of railway operation and control. I sometimes tried to put the two glossaries together to build a German-English dictionary. Finally, I came to the conclusion that this is simply impossible. A lot of terms do not have an expression in the other language, while other terms read like a literal translation but mean completely different things. An example is the British term "blocking back" and the German term "zurückblocken" which have a completely different meaning.
I also find it quite impossible to translate texts on railway operation. You can explain railway operation either in German or in English, but you cannot translate the explanations.
Jörn