express train

English

Noun

express train (plural express trains)

1. (rail transport) A train (either the service or the train itself) making limited stops.
   • 1906, Edith Nesbit, The Railway Children, Chapter 4: The engine-burglar,

     All sorts of dreadful thoughts came to her all together in one horrible flash. There were such things as express trains that went on, she supposed, for hundreds of miles without stopping. Suppose this should be one of them? How would she get home again? She had no money to pay for the return journey.

   • 1941 October, “Railway Literature”, in Railway Magazine, page 480:

     King's Messenger, 1918-1940: Memoirs of a Silver Greyhound. By George P. Antrobus, O.B.E., King's Foreign Service Messenger 1918-1940. London: Herbert Jenkins Ltd. Price 10s. 6d. net. [...] "The great European express trains have an air of mystery and romance about them. Truth to tell, this is but ill-deserved. Except over the French portion of their journey they have no right to the title of express"—he was writing of conditions before the great speed-up of the last decade— [...].

   • 2021 June 30, Philip Haigh, “Regional trains squeezed as ECML congestion heads north”, in RAIL, number 934, page 53:

     For all the attention on express trains, it's often local trains that tip the railway into congestion.

Synonyms

• crack train (US dialect, dated)
• fast train
• limited

Antonyms

• local train

Translations

a train making limited stops

• Czech: rychlík (cs) m
• Danish: hurtigtog, lyntog, iltog
• Dutch: exprestrein (nl) m, sneltrein (nl) m
• Estonian: kiirrong
• Finnish: pikajuna (fi), kiitojuna
• French: train express m, rapide (fr) m
• German: Schnellzug (de), Intercity (de), ICE (de), Eilzug (de) m
• Hungarian: gyorsvonat (hu), expresszvonat (hu)
• Italian: treno espresso m, espresso (it) m (clipping form), (proper noun +) express (it) m (referring to a named express train, for example: Riviera express, Orient express, ...), EXP m (acronym used on timetables)
• Japanese: 特急 (ja) (tokkyū), 急行 (ja) (kyūkō)
• Norwegian:

  Bokmål: ekspresstog n

  Nynorsk: ekspresstog n

• Pannonian Rusyn: швидки гайзибан m (švidki hajziban)
• Polish: pociąg pospieszny m, pospieszny (pl) m
• Portuguese: trem expresso m
• Romanian: tren expres (ro) n
• Russian: экспре́сс (ru) m (eksprɛ́ss), курье́рский по́езд m (kurʹjérskij pójezd)
• Spanish: tren expreso m
• Swedish: expresståg (sv) n, snälltåg (sv) n

Further reading

• express train on Wikipedia.Wikipedia