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The gaps are there to allow for expansion and contraction. In cold weather the rails will contract leaving gaps between the rails. In warm weather the rails will expand and the gaps will disappear. The ride in summer or winter probably would not change, because when the gaps disappear, there could be a difference in elevation, but not enough to cause a problem.
Yes
If they tend to meet in the distance, the lines have been poorly drawn,or you have to be more accurate when making/constructing them :)=============================No !Parallel lines do appear to meet in the distance. That's the whole basis of theperspective effect in drawing.-- Stand on a railroad track, between the rails, and look at the track-bed in thedistance. The two rails appear to draw together as they get farther from you.-- Same if you stand in the middle of a straight road . . . it appears to get narrowerand the curbs draw together as they get farther from you.-- During a meteor shower, the individual meteors are parallel to each other, butto us, they appear to radiate from a single point in the sky.The reason is how our brains judge linear dimensions ... strictly by the ANGLE thatour eyes measure between two points. Anything that fills a smaller angle is perceivedas being a shorter distance. Distant people and airplanes subtend smaller angles andappear to be smaller than nearby ones, although we learn to compensate for that.The angle that parallel lines subtend at our eyes becomes smaller as they get fartheraway, which our brains interpret as a shorter linear distance between them. Turn itaround, and when you draw a picture of parallel lines, you can make them appear torecede in the distance by drawing them sloped toward each other.
step ladder
No, they have to be straight. --------------------------- ------------------ Those are parallel lines because they are straight. In geometry, a non-straight line has no meaning. It is allowed that arcs, planes and such can be parallel. In common usage, a twisting and turning line can be described as parallel to another, such as the rails of a railroad track, even though they are not co-planar or straight. It may not be proper by geometric definition but it is descriptive and conveys the meaning adequately.