Railway operations

The tenth entry is o intervalo entre comboios, and Portuguese names it in the plainest way available: the interval between trains. The English term of art is a single word, « the headway », and it is a word that most speakers own without ever using it on its own. Away from the railway, « headway » survives almost only inside one phrase, « to make headway », which is to get forward against something that resists: « we are making headway with the paperwork », « the talks made little headway ». The noun is made, not had, and it takes no plural. The railway borrows the same word and turns it into a measurement, the time, or sometimes the distance, between one train and the train behind it, as in « a two-minute headway ». It belongs to the old sea family of « way », the movement of a vessel through the water, which also gives « under way » and « sternway ». So a reader who knows only the idiom hears progress where the timetable means a gap, and a gap is the opposite of getting on.