Railtrack is not a general word for railway tracks. It is the name of a private British company that, from 1996 until 2001, owned and looked after most of the railway tracks in the UK — the rails, the land, the signals, not the trains themselves. The trains were run by other companies. The government later shut Railtrack down: it had not kept the system safe enough, had not done the job well, and had fallen into debt. After that, a public body took over the tracks. Students will almost only see this name in news or history about British railways in those years.