Talk:Electrification of the London and South Western Railway

Comments on new article

A few comments on a couple of things:

1. The article should probably be titled "Electrification of the London and South Western Railway", spelling the railway's name in full. A redirect from its current name could be used for those searching by the abbreviation.
2. Presumably the electrified routes in the various maps are the routes coloured red, though this is not stated in the captions or the maps themselves. Are the blue lines the original LSWR lines and the black lines the other lines from the LSWR era (LB&SCR and SECR, etc.)?
3. The Chessington branch line is mentioned but not the Wimbledon to Sutton line. Like the Chessington line, this was built by the the Southern Railway and was electrified from the beginning of services in 1929. Did the latter not form part of the Western Region of the Southern Railway?
4. The Chessington branch section starts "Due to the combination of tramway services and the efficient Southern Railway electric suburban trains, housing developed intensively along and south of the LSWR main line. Chessington and the surrounding district was particularly heavily developed". There are a couple of problems with this:
   1. Tramway services south of the main line were fairly limited - they ran through New Malden on the way to Kingston with a branch from there to Surbiton and Tolworth. It could be argued that the construction of the Kingston by-pass in the 1920s stimulated development in the area as well.
   2. As worded, the paragraph suggests that the line was planned to serve the "heavily developed" area. Whilst it is true that New Malden and Surbiton developed with the help of the railway and the trams, it's not true that Chessington itself did. Most of the housing in the Motspur Park, Hook, Tolworth and Chessington area dates from the 1930s, after the branch line was approved. Tolworth and Hook (including where Chessington North station is) were developed in the 1930s, but actual Chessington had very little development - just a few roads extended south from Hook. What was subsequently built mostly replaced temporary wartime facilities and industrial buildings.

DavidCane (talk) 15:22, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

1) I thought it better to keep the title brief; as this is a fairly specialised subject, I am assuming that 99% of readers will know what LSWR means, and will not be enlightened by the full title. I think anyway most people will come here from a google search, rather than typing the title -- any title -- into Wikipedia's search function.

2) Yes, but I thought it would be oppressive to spell this out. Is it not obvious? It would also have led to vast explanatory notes: Wokingham - Reading was SER but was a Western Section Electrification. Yes, you're right, 4.5 miles at Reading to Earley was transferred to the Western Region; the only bit of live rail on the (G)WR outside the inner London area. Also Leatherhead joint station to Dorking was obvs Central but was part of this Western section electrification. Havant to Portcreek Jn was LBSCR and from there to the Harbour was joint, but the Portsmouth Direct was obviously (former) LSWR until the Mid-Sussex was electrified a year later.

3) We are into scope definitions here. Even "Western section of the Southern Railway" is fraught with difficulty. Since hardly any reader has access to an authoritative Southern Railway declaration of what "Western Section" meant, we are forced back on to what people might understand it to mean. Wimbledon to Sutton looked to me like a Central Section route when I was travelling on it, headcode 06, operated by 4-Epb's. Holborn Viaduct (yes, I know, Eastern Section) - Tulse Hill - Streatham - Wimbledon - Sutton - West Croydon - Selhurst - Streatham - London Bridge. I call that Central Divison. YMMV. 4) The tramways reference is a quote from Jenkins, I think. He also mentions the Kingston by-pass, and in an early draft I included that. Then I thought it wouldn't make sense to the average reader, that the construction of a road by-pass encouraged building a railway. In addition, I thought the article was already too long, and there was a limit to the qualifications I felt it right to put in. Afterbrunel (talk) 16:54, 29 December 2022 (UTC)