Word.ws English Dictionary

parliamentary train

parliamentary train noun: originally a requirement in the Railway Regulation Act 1844 for railways to run at least one train a day each way, at a cost to passengers of no more than one penny a mile, on every railway line in the country. Presently the term is used for passenger trains that serve a line or station only once a day or week to avoid the cost of applying for closure.

Noun

parliamentary train (plural parliamentary trains)

  1. (UK, historical) Originally a requirement in the Railway Regulation Act 1844 for railways to run at least one train a day each way, at a cost to passengers of no more than one penny a mile, on every railway line in the country. Presently the term is used for passenger trains that serve a line or station only once a day or week to avoid the cost of applying for closure.
    • He [Gladstone] also required the operators to run 'Parliamentary Trains' - one each day calling at every station at a fare of not more than a penny per mile for Third Class.2012, Andrew Martin, Underground Overground: A passenger's history of the Tube, Profile Books, →ISBN, page 34
    • The idiot who, in railway carriages, / Scribbles on window panes, / We only suffer / To ride on a buffer / In Parliamentary trains.1885, W. S. Gilbert, The Mikado, Act II, in The Mikado, and Other Plays, New York: Modern Library, 1917, p. 42, https://archive.org/details/mikadootherplays00gilb

Forms of parliamentary train

pluralparliamentary trains

Questions about parliamentary train

What does parliamentary train mean?
Parliamentary train means originally a requirement in the Railway Regulation Act 1844 for railways to run at least one train a day each way, at a cost to passengers of no more than one penny a mile, on every railway line in the country. Presently the term is used for passenger trains that serve a line or station only once a day or week to avoid the cost of applying for closure.
What part of speech is parliamentary train?
Parliamentary train is a noun.
What is the plural of parliamentary train?
The plural of parliamentary train is parliamentary trains.

Words near parliamentary train in the dictionary

  1. parliamentary procedures
  2. Parliamentary red
  3. parliamentary republic
  4. parliamentary republics
  5. Parliamentary Secretary
  6. parliamentary train
  7. parliamentary trains
  8. parliamentary under secretary
  9. parliamentlike
  10. parliaments
  11. parlied

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: parliamentary 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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