Hobbies And Interests
Industry
Understanding the use of the term requires examining industrial uses of the word "raceway." Automotive engineering uses the term to reference the metal carrier that houses wheel bearings on an axle. Building construction will refer to the use of a metal track to carry wires on the surface as a raceway. These are often capped after wires are installed.
Engineering
On a larger scale, a raceway forms the path on which a component is mounted. In essence, a railroad track could be a raceway because it forms the path and guides the train. In factories, large machines that require movement are mounted on tracks or beds of steel that are referred to as raceways. A machine such as a lathe has its components mounted on finely machined surfaces called races to insure parallelism.
Recreation
To make matters more complex, there are a number of uses for the term in recreation, both indoor and outdoor. Horse racing, auto racing, slot car racing, go-cart racing and ad infinitim, recreational uses of the term abound. Using the most primal definition, any defined path may be called a raceway.
Final Analysis
Popular names like Talladega, Daytona, Churchill Downs and Monte Carlo refer to a raceway of one type or another. The final analysis is that a raceway, in any modern reference, describes a path that can be taken or is fixed. It can be very small as the raceway carrying the wire to a pacemaker or very large as the raceway used to move the space shuttle from storage to launch pad.