"Я вижу железную дорогу, но где станция?"
Translation:I see the railway but where is the station?
18 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
"I see railroad" sounds incorrect to me. Rather "I see a railroad" would be more proper.
Вокзал is a major station with a building that provides passenger service—or even the actual building.
We do not have the word in the course because it has no exact equivalent in Enlgish. "Terminal" or "terminus", maybe. The Russian word, however, is more about the building. I wonder if people actually use it, because вокзал is certainly a common word if the station you are talking about happens to be a вокзал.
A usual station may look like this or this (real comfy during rain, right?)
The first photo looks like a stop for commuter trains, is остановка ever used to describe them?
We can use остановка to describe the act of stopping ("Поезд следует со всеми остановками, кроме станций Солнечная, 78 километр, Щелковская") but we do not call stations themselves остановка.
If I were outside, I'd say, "I see (/the) (/train) tracks, but ... ?" On the other hand, if I were looking at a map, I'd use the translation as provided.
Is the former accepted? I.e., "I see (/the) tracks ... ?" or "I see (/the) train tracks ... ?"
Amazingly, it is, even though the translations haven't changed since 2015. What about "railway tracks", or "railway line" (and the same with "railroad")? It's nice to include some variety; however, at some point you have to decide the options are not exactly the same. After all, Russian has рельсы and железнодорожные пути, too.
"I see the rail tracks, but where's the station."
As it often comes up, the point here is to practice Russian, not English, and I think that there's rarely a literal correspondence between words across languages. The picture here is super clear to me — someone sees the "whatever it is the trains run along," but they still don't see the station itself. I see no harm whatsoever, and in fact lots of benefits in being flexible about how to refer to "railroad" in the English translation :-)
On the one hand, yes — there are a few spots with extremely long distances between stations, topping at 24 km / 15 miles: https://yandex.ru/maps/-/CCUurKHfTD
However, most distances between stations are 1–10 km (there are only 20 gaps >=14 km on the Trans-Siberian). And you do not have to go that far from Moscow to have miles between the stations–e.g., Balabanovo and Obninsk are about 10 km away.
