Norfolk and Suffolk Joint Railway (N&S): the Midland and Great Northern and the Great Eastern Railway). There were two stretches of line: the most important ran along the East Anglian coast from Lowestoft to Yarmouth, while a much shorter stretch ran from Cromer to Mundesley on the North Norfolk coast. This line was a unique joint railway in that one of its parents was itself a joint railway.
"Joint railways" are called terminal railroads in the United States. Most true example of joint railways are in terminal areas, including union stations. Terminal railways are often co-owned by the railroads that connect with them. Among the more prominent joint operations were:
Conrail Shared Assets Operations (CSAO), the last corporate remnant of Conrail, which was formed from the remains of several bankrupt railroads in 1976; that company was split between CSX and Norfolk Southern, which formed CSAO in northern New Jersey, greater Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and greater Detroit, Michigan. Unlike the BRC and TRRA, CSAO uses crews and locomotives from its two parent companies, though the former Conrail paint scheme is still seen on numerous locomotives and freight cars that CSX and NS inherited.
The Powder River basin joint line, co-owned by BNSF and Union Pacific to serve the area's numerous coal mines.
The concept of trackage rights is more common than joint railways in the United States. The railroad that owns the track permits trains from another railroad to use the line. The owner railroad normally charges a fee, but sometimes there is no charge because the arrangement results from a merger or sale of a line. For instance, when the Louisville and Nashville Railroad acquired the Monon Railroad a condition of the sale imposed by government regulators was a trackage rights arrangement over the southern part of the Monon for the Milwaukee Road, an agreement that was handed down to successive owners of the Milwaukee Road and finally the Indiana Rail Road.
Variations on trackage rights include "direction running" agreements between two railroads with parallel lines through an area, usually done to facilitate greater traffic volume. [citation needed] For instance, CSX and NS have a directional-running agreement between downtown Cincinnati, Ohio and nearby Hamilton, where northbound trains generally use NS trackage and southbound trains (with the exception of Amtrak's Cardinal) use CSX tracks. North of Hamilton, NS trains use CSX tracks on a traditional trackage-rights agreement for a two-mile (3 km) section.