Gate (English Gate) is a widely used unofficial name for the junction of a railway line with a city metro or tram system. Gates are used for unloading trams brought on railway platforms or for transferring goods from trains to freight trams. Also for the import of metro trains into subways.

Gate types

Crossing paths

In countries where the tram and railway tracks do not differ or differ little from each other in width (to the extent that it allows the use of rolling stock on both types of track), a direct transition of railway rails to tramways is possible. Moreover, it is usually impossible to indicate the exact place of the transition in this case due to the uniformity of the track. Cranes and various types of jack posts are used to move cars from platforms to rails. For example, this option is used in Moscow at the terminal station „Ugreshskaya Ulitsa".

There is a similar gate in Kharkov (on Chebotarskaya street) and Zaporozhye (near the Motor Sich plant). In Minsk, the railway gate was located in the reversal ring of the 2nd tram route and exited through the access roads of the plant. October Revolution to the station Minsk-Vostochny.

In this case, carriages can freely move from the railway directly to the tram tracks.



Electric tram locomotive EPM3B on the connecting branch between the railway station and the tram line


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Truck unloading of Tatra T4 tram cars transported on flat wagons. The railway track turns into a tramway



In Novosibirsk, at the Novosibirsk-Zapadny station, there was a gate earlier. At the moment, a section of the previously operated branch of this gate has been preserved.

In Stary Oskol, there was a gate connecting the tracks of the high-speed tram and the branches of the oil depot. Disassembled during the reconstruction of the highway.

Parallel paths

An option acceptable for countries with any track gauge is the parallel arrangement of rail and tram tracks, in which the transfer of wagons from railway platforms to tram tracks is carried out by cranes. In the case of a uniform track gauge, this arrangement may have a connecting path.

Overpasses-dead ends

To unload tram cars from railway and automobile platforms, unloading ramps-dead-ends can also be used, on which the tram track is raised relative to the railway track (or road surface) to the loading height of the platform. At the same time, the rails on the platform are combined with the tram rails on the overpass, and the car, under its own power or in tow, moves off the platform. This is how the cars are loaded onto railway platforms at the St. Petersburg Tram Mechanical Plant and the Ust-Katavskiy Carriage Works named after S. M. Kirov (UKVZ).

In the CIS, this is the most common type of gate. There are similar flyovers-dead ends in St. Petersburg (at PTMZ), Tula (Aleksinsky deadlock), Ulan-Ude, Irkutsk, Angarsk, Barnaul, Kursk, Samara, Saratov (near the terminal tram route No. 7) Chelyabinsk, Kolomna, Noginsk, Perm, Mariupol. In Biysk, such a gate has existed since 1959 and was dismantled in the early 1990s. In Tver, such a gate has existed on the Darwin Passage since the 1960s (the railway line to the Vagzhanov factory) and was dismantled in the early 2000s in connection with the liquidation of the railway line itself.

In this case, the railway track is „isolated" from the tramway.

An overpass previously existed at Tula-1 Kurskaya station. At the moment, only the railway line remains from the gate.