Names of the lines

[whole diary]

[Tim]

I'm happy to stick with "main" and "relief".  But I don't think that "slow" and "fast" are wrong in most circumstances.  They are perfectly clear and accurate descriptions even if they are not the official names. 

the "relief line" is the "slow line". in the same way as "Beechen Cliff Academy" is the "boys school"

[4064ReadingAbbey]

I'm also happy to stick with 'Main' and 'Relief'. Changing things which are so engrained can lead to confusion - and that can lead to errors. And, after all, they are just names to identify which pair of tracks are which - they are not descriptions

Anyway, if the genuine GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) called them that, who am I to disagree?

[PhilWakely]

Main and relief.

Purely for tradition. Acknowledging that GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) (the proper one, not the young pretender) did things differently.

hear, hear!

[Godfrey Tables]

The only alternative name I can think of for the pair is "express" and "general" - but even then it's probably not fitting for one reason or another. This very much reminds me of trying to come up with names for objects used in programming languages. No matter what you come up with it won't really fit and due to the evolving nature of things will end up being wrong or misleading in the near future 

For this reason I think if I ever had pets, I'd just call them "Cat 1", "Cat 2" and "Cat 3" etc (assuming the pets in question were actually cats)

[Western Pathfinder]

Cat5 would be the one with the Internet connection then ?.

[JayMac]

Or Cat 5 is the one who'd do most damage to your house.

[patch38]

And Cat5E would be the one with the Internet connection from Yorkshire.