Word.ws English Dictionary

milk train

milk train noun: a slow passenger train leaving in the early hours of the morning.

Noun

milk train (plural milk trains)

  1. (UK, colloquial) A slow passenger train leaving in the early hours of the morning.
    • But I also felt again the remembered romantic warmth of nodding off on the milk-train home in the early hours, with Liz by my side.2012, Pete Townshend, Who I Am, HarperCollins, →ISBN, page 245
  2. A goods train that carried milk, usually in tank wagons.
    • On the Western Region, milk trains work up to London from Penzance, Wellington (Som.), Weymouth, Whitland, Carmarthen and Wootton Bassett, each train making several intermediate stops to attach further milk tanks, and in some cases to shed them.1959 March, R. C. Riley, “Home with the Milk”, in Trains Illustrated, page 154

Forms of milk train

pluralmilk trains

Origin of milk train

Familiarised from the early morning goods trains used to transport milk on the British railway system.

Questions about milk train

What does milk train mean?
Milk train means a slow passenger train leaving in the early hours of the morning.
What part of speech is milk train?
Milk train is a noun.
What is the plural of milk train?
The plural of milk train is milk trains.

Words near milk train in the dictionary

  1. milk toasts
  2. milk token
  3. milk tokens
  4. milk tongue
  5. milk tooth
  6. milk train
  7. milk trains
  8. milk treading
  9. milk truck
  10. milk trucks
  11. milk tusk

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: milk train (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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