Drill the map, not flashcards. Free, no account.
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Can you guess which countries use each of the different bollard types?
Which German states build with the A profile, and which with the B?
Which countries use the different chevron types?
Have you committed the pedestrian crossing sign stripe counts to memory?
The steel barrier along the side of a road is the same idea everywhere and not the same object anywhere: the profile pressed into the rail is a national choice. Europe runs on three of them, one of which covers most of the continent while the other two mark out a small, useful set of countries. That is what makes guardrails worth learning. They are not an answer on their own, they are a fast way to rule most of Europe in or out.
A guardrail (crash barrier, Armco, Leitplanke) is a steel beam bolted to posts
along the edge of a road, shaped so it bends rather than snaps when something
hits it. The shape doing that work is pressed into the beam, and it is what you
are reading: from a car the profile shows up as the pattern of horizontal light
and shadow running along the rail.
Guardrails are worth checking because they are on every motorway and most main roads, they are large, and they sit at exactly the height a street-level camera looks at. They are also slow to change: a barrier put up in the eighties is still the barrier today.
Count the bands on the face of the rail.
The catch is the angle. Head-on, a two-band rail is unmistakable; at a shallow angle, or in flat light, the shadow that separates the bands can disappear. Get a stretch of barrier that runs away from the camera and read it there.
| Profile | Where you see it |
|---|---|
| Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Moldova, Portugal, San Marino, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom37 countries | |
| Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Kosovo, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Turkey9 countries | |
| Czechia, Slovakia2 countries |
The game only asks about the two narrow profiles. Being asked to place the common one would be a question about most of Europe at once, which is not a question worth answering, but it is listed here because recognising it is half of the skill: knowing that you are looking at the default is what stops you guessing.
These are the countries where both profiles are in service, so either picture is a correct answer for them and neither one settles the country by itself.
A scattered list, but a genuinely narrow one: nine countries out of forty-four, and the ones on it are easy to separate from each other with a plate or a sign.
Two countries and nothing else in Europe. They are hard to tell apart from each other and easy to tell apart from everyone else, so this profile does most of the work in a single look.
The default, in thirty-seven of the forty-four countries here. Worth recognising precisely so that you spend no more time on it: see this and the guardrail has told you what it has to tell you, which is that the country is probably not one of the eleven above.
It is the shape pressed into the steel beam. The A profile reads as a single band with one rib through the middle and is the standard across most of Europe. The B profile reads as two bands, one above the other, and is used by a much smaller group of countries. Czechia and Slovakia use a shallower version of the two-band rail again.
Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Kosovo, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia and Turkey use the ordinary-depth two-band profile, and Czechia and Slovakia use the shallow version. Germany, Ireland, Montenegro and Turkey also use the common single-band profile, so both are in service there.
They are a good filter rather than a good answer. Most of Europe shares one profile, so recognising it rules out about a dozen countries at a glance, and spotting one of the other two cuts the map down to a handful. Pair it with bollards, chevrons or a plate to finish the job.
Because the answer would be most of Europe. A round is only worth playing when the picture narrows something down, so the game asks about the two profiles that do, and this page lists the common one for recognition.
The other roadside clues have games of their own: European Bollards, European Chevrons and European Pedestrian Signs.
