The Rhaetian Railway, abbreviated RhB, is a Swiss transport company that owns the largest network of all private railway operators in Switzerland. The RhB operates all the railway lines of the Swiss canton of Graubünden/Grisons, except for the line from Sargans to the cantonal capital, which are operated by the Swiss Federal Railways, the line from Disentis/Mustér to the Oberalp Pass, further on to Andermatt, operated by Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn. Inaugurated in 1888 and expanded from 1896 onwards in various sections, the RhB network is located entirely within Graubünden, with one station across the Italian border at Tirano; the Rhaetian Railway serves a number such as St Moritz and Davos. One of the RhB lines, the Bernina Railway, crosses the Bernina Pass at 2,253 metres above sea level and runs down to Tirano, Lombardy in Italy. In 2008, the RhB section from the Albula/Bernina area was added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites; the Albula-Bernina line is the first rail line in the world to be photographed and put on Google Street View.

The establishment of the Rhaetian Railway traces back to Dutchman Willem Jan Holsboer, who proposed a railway line from Landquart to Davos in 1888. Holsboer founded the Lanquart-Davos AG to begin construction of a standard-gauge line, but the mountainous terrain lacked sufficient space. On 29 June 1888, a ground-breaking ceremony took place for a narrow-gauge railway instead. In 1895, Holsboer changed his company's name to the Rhaetian Railway to reflect his plans for network expansion. In 1897, a referendum was held for the Rhaetian Railway to bid on operations of the Graubünden/Grisons State Railways. During the years 1907 to 1910, the Rhaetian Railway, in collaboration with the federal and cantonal governments, undertook a large-scale expansion of its network. In 1896, the Chur-Thusis line opened. All RhB lines are 1,000 mm metre gauge wide and electrified: 61 km is electrified at 1000 V DC. 321 km is electrified at 11 kV 16.7 Hz. The network contains 383 bridges; the maximum gradient is 7% on the Bernina railway, 6% on the Chur–Arosa line and 4.5% on Landquart–Davos line.

Current passenger services as operated by the RhB: In 2002 the annual traffic carried by the RhB was 300 million passenger-kilometres and 54 million tonne-kilometres of freight. 80% of the passenger income comes from tourist traffic, although 40% of passengers are local commuters. Landquart railway station in Graubünden is the starting point of the Rhaetian Railway as part of the Landquart-Davos line, operationally as the company's main workshop, topologically as the 0 kilometre point of the company's core network; the Landquart-Davos line is the oldest in the Rhaetian Railway network. After leaving Landquart, the line to Davos crosses the river Landquart, generally follows the river upstream as far as Klosters, crossing the river several times along the way. Just beyond Klosters, there are two tunnels. One of these is for the Vereina line; the other, the Klosters loop tunnel, takes the Davos line at a 45 degree angle towards the west. The line to Davos loops back towards the east, inside the Cavadürli loop tunnel, continues through dense larch and other coniferous forests to the Davos Laret.

The highest point on the line is Davos Wolfgang. The line leads back down and along Lake Davos to Davos Dorf, the terminus at Davos Platz; the connecting line from Davos Platz to the Albula Railway at Filisur passes through wild gorges, is technically interesting, not only due to its famous Wiesen Viaduct. The Davos–Filisur line is 19 km long, runs through 14 tunnels extending a total of 4,200 m in length, crosses 28 bridges, it was electrified in 1919. Starting in the Rhine valley, the Landquart-Thusis line runs more or less parallel with the Swiss Federal Railways' Sargans-Landquart-Chur standard gauge line as far as Chur; the line to Thusis simply follows the course of the Rhine to Bonaduz. From there, it follows the Posterior Rhine from Rhäzüns to Thusis; this line begins in Thusis. It continues toward Tiefencastel following the Albula and crosses the Landwasser Viaduct before arriving at Filisur. Shortly after Filisur the line passes its first spiral tunnel continues to Bergün/Bravuogn. Between Bergün/Bravuogn and Preda, at the end of the valley, the line has to achieve a difference in height of about 400 metres inside a horizontal distance of 5 kilometres, without using rack-and-pinion, but with many spirals.

The line enters the Albula Tunnel at 1,815 metres under the Albula Pass. It emerges in the Val Bever; the line continues toward Samedan and arrives at St. Moritz. In 2009 it was announced that an examination of the Albula Tunnel conducted in 2006 had found major degradation of the tunnel, with over 60% of the lining in need of replacement. Furthermore, the bores are small by modern standards, cabling and drainage all need replacement; as a result, it was announc

Midwinter Graces is the eleventh solo studio album by singer-songwriter Tori Amos released on November 10, 2009, through Universal Republic Records. It is the first seasonal album by Amos, is notable for marking her return to a more classical, stripped-down, baroque sound with various synths, string-instruments, the harpsichord and Amos's own signature Bösendorfer piano at center stage, once more; the album, like previous releases from Amos, is available in a single form CD or a Deluxe edition which includes 3 bonus tracks, a 20-page photo book, a DVD containing an interview with Amos. The standard edition was not released in the Canada. An original song by Amos, "A Silent Night With You", was released as the promotional single from the album. Midwinter Graces began as a suggestion by Doug Morris and chief executive officer of Universal Music Group, according to Amos, encouraged her to tackle and complete the project at a moment's notice, in March 2009. After a summer of writing original material and rearranging established hymns and carols for the album, while still on the road for her 2009 world tour, began recording.

Portions of the album were recorded in her husband's recording studio, Martian Studios, in Cornwall, while other sessions were held in Studio City and Los Angeles, New York and Toronto. During interviews for the album, Amos spoke at length about making this album for both her father, a Methodist Priest, for Morris, a liberal man of the Jewish faith. In early November 2009, Amos gave an interview for Pride Source Magazine, in which she disclosed the primary reasoning behind the album." Wanted me to do this," said Amos. "I think the fact that I didn’t write'She’s a Hussy, Merry Christmas' will make everybody happy. There's dancing with Satan or anything like that. There’s nothing disrespectful on this record. "Doug looked at me," continued Amos, "it was March – and he said,'I'm 70, I want you to do this. You can do this. You’ve been doing this your whole life.' He inspired me. He’s been able to have these conversations with me since the mid ’80s, he pushed me to start writing Little Earthquakes, so he’s been in my life for so long.

I hadn’t seen him for 14 years. And though he’s 70, he’s as sharp as he was. "He challenges me, he couldn’t accept that I couldn’t achieve it. He said,'You can do this. If you don’t have something to do, you’ll lose your mind.' So I thought about it, one thing led to another." In another interview, Amos explained, " said to me in March when I was visiting him in New York,'I’ve always wanted to know what you would do with a seasonal album. You’re a minister’s daughter so you grew up with this stuff, but you’re a feminist.' A lot of this music was written when things were puritanical and women didn’t have any rights, so there isn’t a lot of embracing of the feminine except with the Virgin Mary, if that makes any sense. Because he and I were talking about music that goes back, a more pagan style of music where there seems to be a place where goddesses were honoured if you go back into antiquity, and he said,'I’d like to see you have a perspective on the carols and write some of your own.'""I left him and ended up in Florida and it was 100 degrees and Tash came in running in a bikini saying,'Are you playing Christmas music, mummy?'

And I said,'Yeah, I think I am.'." Following the personal struggles with sin, faith and "being a wife and woman" Amos explored on Abnormally Attracted to Sin, she found comfort in immersing herself in the old carols and hymns she sang and played during her youth. When asked how she followed an album "about damnation" with an album embracing spirituality Amos replied, "“You think, let’s go to church.”"I’ve been writing it since I was a little girl," exclaimed Amos during an interview with The Advocate in promotion for the album. " little girl, in church."Amos, who has struggled with and fought her religious upbringing, both through her music and with her own mosaic set of beliefs, approached the prospect of doing a holiday album, or seasonal record, from the perspective of someone, struggling to gain a deep and enriching spirituality not tied to a set of dogmatic beliefs: "I felt that as a minister’s daughter I could open up the circle to all those people who might not want to embrace Christianity, but have a spiritual feeling about the time."The record contains a lot of story and beauty, it does transcend some of the shame that gets attached to some of the music during the season," noted Amos.

There's a side to the record when you listen to it that talks about what is the gold – what is that? It's valuing whom you have in the relationships you've built. It’s not just about success – or it just isn’t all your material possessions anymore – it’s how you live your life, that’s all included in the music."When asked why she chose to have her daughter, Natashya Hawley, sing on the song "Holly and Rose", Amos took the opportunity to draw attention to her whole family's involvement in the piece: "It just sort of happened," said Amos. "It started with Tash's older cousin. Kels is in performing arts school in Boston, she has a big instrument. I thought. ‘Candle: Coventry Carol’ in itself is an ancient song, I thought it would lend itself to that. And Tash was thinking she wanted to do a bawdy song, and I said no. She wanted to do a bawdy British schoolboy read on a carol, and I said, “no, we’re not doing that, we’re not shocking grandma”. I came up with this idea of ‘Holly and Rose’ and she took to that idea

In some Semitic languages, such as Literary Arabic, nunation is the addition of one of three vowel diacritics to a noun or adjective to indicate that the word ends in an alveolar nasal without the addition of the letter nūn. The noun phrase is declinable and syntactically unmarked for definiteness; when writing Literary Arabic in full diacritics, there are three nunation diacritics, which indicate the suffixes -un, -in /-in/, -an /an/. The orthographical rules for nunation with the fatḥah sign ـً‎ is by an additional ا‎ alif, above ةً‎ or above ءً‎. In spoken Arabic, nunation only exists with - an. Since Arabic has no indefinite article, nouns that are nunated are indefinite. However, many definite nouns can be nunated: for example, in the expression أَشْهَدُ أَنَّ مُحَمَّدًا رَسُولُ الله, in which the name محمد Muḥammad, a definite noun, is nunated to مُحَمَّدًا Muḥammadan to indicate that it is in the accusative case Names of people are treated as definite nouns in the grammar of Literary Arabic.

Nunation may refer to the -n ending of duals in Akkadian. Arabic diacritics Mimation iʿrāb