Railway operations

The twenty-first entry of this list, l’interruzione programmata, is named after what stops. Interrompere is to break off, and the noun says that traffic on that stretch is broken off for a while, by arrangement rather than by accident. British railway English reaches the same night’s work from the opposite end and calls it « a possession ». The word is the ordinary legal one for holding a thing, and everything in the practice follows from who holds what: for a fixed number of hours the engineering team, and not the signaller, holds that piece of line. The line is « under possession », engineers « take » a possession and later « give it up », and a « possession overrun » is why the first train of the morning is late. Set the two names side by side and the difference is one of viewpoint rather than of fact. L’interruzione looks at the timetable and sees a gap; « a possession » looks at the track and sees a holder. Neither idea is anywhere in the other word, so a literal rendering in either direction drops the image the other language chose.