Talk:South Devon Railway Company

Page name

The page has been reverted to its original and agreed name. That move was not discussed but was explained as moving it to "standard naming", yet Wiki naming conventions suggest that using the legal status (i.e. "Company") is the correct way to disambiguate this from South Devon Railway Trust. Even now, many months later there are only adozen links to South Devon Railway (1846-1876) while there are around 100 to South Devon Railway Company. Geof Sheppard (talk) 13:59, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

I find one of the most difficult and frustrating things about Wikipedia is that you can't "agree" anything, coz there's no-one to agree it with. Even if you put something on the talk page, if someone feels very strongly about something, they often hold off from declaring it, but then revert any changes. This is absolutely not a personal accusation against you, Geoff, but it does make people nervous about spending time improving what they genuinely believe to be a page in need of improving. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Afterbrunel (talk • contribs) 15:50, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

Needs more text -- and pics

Surely an important railway like the SDR needs some more descriptive material? There are only 39 lines at present, excluding the list of station names -- and surely a narrative style is more interesting to the casual reader than a list?

And we need some more images too. Afterbrunel (talk) 20:51, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Reorganization proposal

The sections on this page about the atmospheric railway and the section Atmospheric railway#South Devon Railway both contain substantial detailed and overlapping information about the same railway. I believe it would be better for one of the sections to be the detailed account and the other to be a summary headed by a {{Details}} hatnote.

There's already a model for this in the treatment of the atmospheric line built for the London and Croydon Railway. I found a short treatment at London and Croydon Railway#Atmospheric railway and inserted a hatnote at the top of that section pointing to the more detailed treatment at Atmospheric railway#London and Croydon Railway.

Comments? Volunteers? —Largo Plazo (talk) 12:20, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

I agree that the detail of this topic should be on the Atmospheric Railway page which will leave this page to deal with the railway company. Geof Sheppard (talk) 13:28, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

I disagree strongly with this idea. The Atmospheric Railway page focuses on technical aspects of the concept, and looks at its adoption historically. Many people, especially outside the UK, may be interested in how the system was adopted in Victorian times, but care nothing for who Brunel was or where on the SDR Teignmouth was. There will be other people who wish to trace the development of the SDR, of which an intrinsic part is the atmospheric caper, but they might not be interested in too much technical detail, and perhaps not at all interested in its application elsewhere in the world.

Obviously there is some overlap in these topics; there is overlap in ever article on Wikipedia, I should imagine. But if we suggest that people reading this article on the SDR should switch half way through to the Atmospheric Article and pick out the SDR-relevant text there, and then later come back here for the post-atmospheric SDR material, I think that is a mistake and will be less helpful to people.

In short, if there is some duplication, why does that matter? A few extra kilobytes on Wikipedia's server? Afterbrunel (talk) 08:13, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

• oppose Much as AfterBrunel. To merge these in the way proposed is to imply that the South Devon has no historical or commercial notability, other than as a footnote to the technical aspects of atmospheric railways. It's rather more than this, even today it's the main line to Plymouth.

This is not a printed paper book. We are not constrained by print costs and do not need to remove duplication. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:54, 19 February 2015 (UTC)