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TTT Railway Title: Recognizability
The TTT Railway was well-known in the South Waikato district, as an important mail, freight and passenger service from about 1907 until 1944. People searching for information about the TTT railway can be expected to search for words and phrases that were commonly used during the time when the TTT railway was operational. Evidence for the appropriate words and phrases will be found in newspapers and other documents published between 1900 and 1950.
The NZ National Library's Papers Past website has a large collection of relevant source documents, which have been digitised and OCR'd.
A search on Papers Past[1] shows an overwhelming preference for names such as "taupo totara timber company railway" and "ttt railway".
The search found a total of 1277 results (hits).
Across all sources, phrases with synonyms for "taupo totara timber company" found 1162 hits, 91% of the total. In the local South Waikato newspaper, Putaruru Press, phrases with "ttt" yielded 98 (84%) results out of a total 117 hits in this newspaper.
There is a very clear preference for "railway" or "line". Across all sources, phrases containing "tramway" found only 56 hits, 4% of the total. "Tramway" is even less popular in the Putaruru Press. None of the search phrases containing "tramway" found any results in the Putaruru Press.[2]
"mokai tramway" ( the existing title of this article) yielded only one result.
Only a very small minority of sources use "mokai railway", "mokai line" or "mokai tramway" (115 hits, 9% of the total). Phrases containing "mokai" were even less popular at the Putaruru Press. Of the three "mokai" search phrases, only "mokai line" found any results: 4 hits (3%) out of a total 117 Putururu Press search results. One of these 4 search results was a story about a game of rugby.
I searched in newspapers and parliamentary papers covering the period from 1 Jan 1900 to 31 Dec 1949. I used an "exact phrase" search, with fifteen separate search phrases. The search phrases and results are listed in the following table.
Search Results
| Search Phrase | Newspapers (all) | Newspapers, Putaruru Press only | Parliamentary Papers | All Sources |
| Totals | 1123 | 117 | 37 | 1277 |
| mokai line | 49 | 4 | 4 | 57 |
| mokai railway | 54 | 0 | 3 | 57 |
| mokai tramway | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| taupo company line | 18 | 0 | 3 | 21 |
| taupo company railway | 5 | 0 | 2 | 7 |
| taupo company tramway | 1 | 0 | 1 | 2 |
| timber company[3] line | 306 | 2 | 8 | 316 |
| timber company[3] railway | 368 | 13 | 4 | 385 |
| timber company[3] tramway | 43 | 0 | 7 | 50 |
| totara company line | 25 | 0 | 2 | 27 |
| totara company railway | 12 | 0 | 2 | 14 |
| totara company tramway | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| ttt line | 128 | 63 | 0 | 191 |
| ttt railway | 111 | 35 | 0 | 146 |
| ttt tramway | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
Subsequent to the initial search, I did an additional "exact phrase" search on all newspapers for "totara line" (38 hits, most TTT), "totara railway" (236 hits, mostly TTT), "totara tramway" (8 hits, 2 relevant to TTT). These results are not included in the above analysis, however, they support my conclusions.
Notes
- ^ "Papers Past". Papers Past. National Library of New Zealand. Retrieved 9 Jun 2024.
- ^ I ran a separate word search for "tramway" in the Putaruru Press. The results showed that the Putaruru Press preferred to reserve "tramway" for urban passenger trams.
- ^ a b c Phrases containing "timber company" find articles about other timber companies, except in the Putaruru Press. The results support the conclusion that "railway" and "line" were preferred to "tramway".