Milestone
A milestone is a numbered marker placed on a route such as a road, railway line, canal or boundary.
They can indicate the distance to towns, cities, and other places or landmarks like mileage signs; or they can give their position on the route relative to some datum location.
Such references are also used by maintenance engineers and emergency services to direct them to specific points where their presence is required.
[citation needed] Many Roman milestones only record the name of the reigning emperor without giving any placenames or distances.
Odometers were used to measure the Roman milestone spacing, most likely based on Ancient Greek technology.
[citation needed] A mile-marker monument, the Milion, was erected in the early 4th century AD in Constantinople.
It served as the starting point for measurement of distances for all the roads leading to the cities of the Byzantine Empire, and had the same function as the Milliarium Aureum of Ancient Rome.
A translation of the text written on the stone currently found in the Kasserine Museum in the Golan reads as follows: In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.
He ordered the making of these miles, Abdul Malik bin Marwan, Commander of the Faithful.
[2] The Kos Minars or Mile Pillars are medieval milestones that were made by the 16th-century Afghan Ruler Sher Shah Suri and later on by Mughal emperors.
The Kos Minar is a solid round pillar, around 30 feet (9.1 m) in height that stands on a masonry platform built with bricks and plastered over with lime.
Though not architecturally very impressive, being milestones, they were an important part of communication and travel in a large empire.
[4][5] The historical term milestone is still used today, even though the "stones" are typically metal highway location markers and in most countries use kilometres and metres rather than miles and yards.
Kilometre plates have white text on a trapezoidal green background, and are generally located about a metre above the ground.
In Alberta, for example, kilometre markers are green metal signs with white lettering, and are generally placed every 4 km starting at the last major intersection to the south or west, depending on whether the route runs north–south or east–west.
In the UK, driver location signs are placed every 500 metres (550 yd) along each side of motorways, and along some other major roads.
Some historic and scenic routes – such as along the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina and Virginia and the Overseas Highway of the Florida Keys – use mileposts to mark points of interest or (in the cases of many businesses along the Overseas Highway) as a portion of their address.
Section 94 states: "The company shall cause the length of the railway to be measured, and milestones, posts, or other conspicuous objects to be set up and maintained along the whole line thereof, at the distance of one quarter of a mile from each other, with numbers or marks inscribed thereon denoting such distances.
Structure signs often include the mileage to a fair degree of precision; in the UK, the chain (equal to 1⁄80 mile or 20 metres) is the usual accuracy.
A series of such boundary markers exists at one mile (1.6 km) intervals along the borders of the District of Columbia in the United States.
