See fourth rail in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
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"ref": "1948 January and February, C. R. L. Coles, “The Grouping Era”, in Railway Magazine, page 21:",
"text": "It was the only line to operate by means of the third-rail system (as distinct from the fourth-rail system now universal on all London's Underground railways) and its coaches were of different design and appearance from those on other systems.",
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"ref": "2012, Andrew Martin, Underground Overground: A passenger's history of the Tube, Profile Books, →ISBN, page 103:",
"text": "The railway used the 'Third Rail' system of electrification, like all the early Tubes. (But it would soon be replaced across the network by another system even more exciting - Fourth''' Rail!)",
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],
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"An extra rail in addition to the third rail (live rail) which is used for current return purposes, mainly by London Underground, because of problems caused by using the running rails for current return underground."
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"(rail transport) An extra rail in addition to the third rail (live rail) which is used for current return purposes, mainly by London Underground, because of problems caused by using the running rails for current return underground."
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"word": "fourth rail"
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Download raw JSONL data for fourth rail meaning in English (2.1kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-01-03 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-01-01 using wiktextract (96027d6 and 9905b1f). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.