support for the rails in railroad tracks
Wooden ties are used on many traditional railways. In the background is a track with concrete ties.
A railroad tie, crosstie (American English), railway tie (Canadian English) or railway sleeper (Australian and British English) is a rectangular support for the rails in railroad tracks. Generally laid perpendicular to the rails, ties transfer loads to the track ballast and subgrade, hold the rails upright and keep them spaced to the correct gauge.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).