Talk:UK railway stations – A

Scope of and Redundancy in Listings

We need a debate about the scope of these - e.g. Tyne & ear metro? DLR? I would like it to be wider than Network rail - e.g. there's a private railway station in Scotland with connections to aviemore (and I forget its name as I write) ... I;d prefer we list it. We have space. We can typify them later, if we want.

however I'd strongly urge that we permit redundant listings, so we can have:

• Brighton London Road and
• London Road (Brighton)

• Euston
• London Euston

--Tagishsimon

---

I think redundancy is essential. As for scope - leave in the T&W Metro, and the Clockwork Orange in Glasgow, but leave out DLR and Underground, as covered elsewhere?

Keen to include all in-service stations whether privately or publicly owned, but what about:

• Railbus stops (Corby, for instance)?
• Preserved railways that try to run a 'normal' service (Wensleydale Rly)?
• Preserved railways that don't?
• Closed stations?

The line is somewhere in the middle, but I'm not sure where. Large closed stations (like London Broad Street) probably deserve an entry for historical interest, but not in this list. (edit: I'm adding some closed stations, and stations on preserved railways that don't try to run a normal service to List_of_closed_railway_stations_in_Britain)

-- Ephialtes 12/xi/05

Deletion Debate

The below is pasted from Wikipedia:Votes for deletion when this article was at its original title UK Railway Stations 1 (with others at 2-5)

And numbers 2 - 5: A list of railway stations with no wikification. Not sure if it could be made useful, but is not at present. Certainly the postcodes should be removed. Warofdreams 16:08, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

• KEEP - Acts as a useful index page to UK Stations:
  • Postcodes now link to Multimap station location maps
  • Station codes are interesting new information.
  • It's much more a candidate for 'Cleanup' (and chopping up into smaller pages which are renamed?) than VfD. --Tagishsimon 04:45, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

• Keep - can be further developed with links from and to towns, info about the stations, etc. R and S in the page names should be lower case, however.--Patrick 20:59, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)
• Rename. It's a good idea - as long as it doesn't duplicate the lines already covered in the London Underground list. However, UK Railway Stations 1 isn't the best name. Ambivalenthysteria 23:19, 4 Apr 2004 (UTC)
• Keep - codes are really useful. Could add "http://www.livedepartureboards.co.uk/ldb/summary.aspx?T=" before each code so that it links to live departure information for each station. E.g. http://www.livedepartureboards.co.uk/ldb/summary.aspx?T=WAT would provide info for London Waterloo.
  • Done for all UK Railway Stations 1 - UK Railway Stations 5. Excellent hack - thanks. Then perhaps someone (me?) should chop the pages into something smaller & more managable, and put an A-Z index together...maybe later. --Tagishsimon 18:49, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)
• Keep but rename to something like UK Railway Stations A-E. Also, some of the stations have articles already - all should be linked.
• Keep. Maybe some cleanup issues, but Wikipedia is also an almanac. Niteowlneils 14:05, 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)
• Keep - useful. Maybe rename to UK National Rail Stations
• Keep - a lot of work has gone into this. Secretlondon 16:30, 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)
  • And in conclusion, UK railway stations - A - UK railway stations - Y and lots of wiki linking &c &c. Sadly this means there are 24 pages to remove the VfD from... --Tagishsimon 17:17, 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)

GB versus UK

Note that apart from two Belfast entries AFAIK this is currently a list of GB, not UK, railway stations. A very useful set of pages all the same! -- 81.153.96.221 13:16, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

Then we need to add NI stations. --Tagishsimon (talk)

Postcodes

Where did the postcodes on this series of articles (the ones that link to multimap.com) come from? Most of the stations on the Chase Line seem wrong - e.g. Rugeley Town points to Hednesford, Cannock and Landywood both point to Landywood, and the postcode given for Hednesford is invalid. A handful of others I've looked at seem ok, but is there a primary source we can go back to? sjorford 14:32, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

No, they just appeared on Wikipedia one day. If the multimap links are incorrect, the best thing to do would be to change them. What we do about the postcode is anyone's guess. --Tagishsimon (talk)

Possibly from http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/stations/ . 80.229.231.194 20:17, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Many of the postcodes are wrong. In the letter "A" there are invalid postcodes for 15 stations. The first is Aberdare which is given as CF44 7FA and should be CF44 0PU. I suggest that it would be best to substitute a map reference, although of course it will mean a lot of work. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.170.118.163 (talk) 09:20, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Experimental format change

Spurred on by the FLC mentioned above, I thought we might experiment with a new table format. I'm not sure what our background colours should be, so have nicked colours used in some other table I saw somewhere. I don't like that shade of blue. And I've added another column: but this now leaves us with two identical codes on each line (and thinking about it now, I suspect it would be possible to edit the existing template:brldb rather than create a new template as I've just done. Suggestions on the best anchors for the two external links welcomed. Oh, and I made the table titles more snappy, at the cost of losing the link to livedepartureboards. Can I suggest we fiddle around with the A page for a while and then cascade changes to all of the pages. --Tagishsimon (talk)

• Change not really needed. Each of the Train Times pages that brldb links to has a link to the information page, so we are only saving the user one click. What does suggestions on the best anchors for the two external links welcomed mean? -- RHaworth 2005 June 29 21:54 (UTC)
• Or try what I've done to Abbey Wood. A Φ beside the post code is a link to the aerial photo. A letter i beside the station code is a link to the info page. Suitably explained in the table title, these might work. I would like the Φ and the i to be icons but I don't think Wiki supports that. -- RHaworth 2005 June 29 22:32 (UTC)
  • Before I had an Edit Conflict with you I was going to say:

In all my years of using livedepartureboards (actually, not often) I hadn;t noticed that they had a link through to the info pages. So yes, the new column: stay or go. Don't mind. The anchor comment: we use the codes as anchors - i.e. the text around which the link is made. Were we to keep the two links, we could do with something better than repeating the code twice on each line. What about the format? Pretty coloured tables better than boring default tables?

I like Abbey Wood. It's still a bit arbitrary of us to link the code to livedepartureboards, but I'm bereft of better ideas. --Tagishsimon (talk)

• Using code as the text of the anchor seems natural to me - not arbitrary at all. I am sure you don't need to repeat bgcolor=#F4F9FF on every row but I don't speak CSS well enough to give you a quick solution. -- RHaworth 2005 July 1 08:59 (UTC)
  • Trouble is, when you've lost the header on a long list, you're presented with a couple of columns both of which have the same three letter acronyms. Which is which? Even I can't remember, familiar though I am with these pages. For me, the user interface presented in the table is just not intuitive. Equally, I quite like the gentle pace of this debate. --Tagishsimon (talk)

Front page for Railway Stations

There should be a general page for UK railway stations: history and design, bibliography etc (There are several of books on the subject, including London's Terminii).

Jackiespeel 17:59, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

• Agreed. Do you have any of those books and some time on your hands? I have neither, but would like to read the article. --Tagishsimon (talk)

New set of templates for these pages

I have created some templates to boil down even further some of the changes already made. I have put in the changes into the firsst few rows to give people a chance to comment if they like it or not. The basic format is:

{{Ukrshdr}}
{{Ukrsrow|station page name|station name|postcode 1|postcode 2|station code}}
...
... etc
{{Ukrsftr}}

I think this will make maintenance very easy going forward for these pages. After I get a few comments and if they are positive I'll write a script to change all the pages.

ChrisUK 23:09, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Positive. Go for it. --Tagishsimon (talk)

Ditto. Go for it. Please rember to put an extra | when there is no station code - see my correction. It really pains me to see sensible map links using Grid Refs reverted to ones using post codes but I have to admit that it is the simplest solution (eg. Campbell's platform - not my edit). -- RHaworth 11:03, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

This page is broken, or very confusing.

Visting the list for the first time, it took me a good 5 minutes to work out why the UK only seemed to have railway stations starting with the letter A.

The use of show/hide options on navigation templates is normally great, but here is absolutely the wrong place to use it. The way the page is used and linked-to requires that the A-Z list is always visible on first viewing, rather than hidden away behind an obscure 'show' link. -- Starbois (talk) 14:41, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

I agree --Robert EA Harvey (talk) 11:40, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

fixed. No state was defined, so it defaulted to collapsed. Changed to plain si it is displayed without the option. --Robert EA Harvey (talk) 18:10, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Source of CRS codes, postcodes, copyright status

Does anyone know the source of the 3 letter codes and the postcodes? It would be good to be clear on this so that data could be used in projects like OpenStreetMap --LeedsTracker (talk) 14:11, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

All three letter codes and postcodes are available from National Rail's web. Simply south not SS, sorry 14:25, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

The post code links to Multimap are broken and should be removed or repaired. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mphammer (talk • contribs) 12:30, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

The codes arrived in this edit in 2004. As SS said, they are in use on the national rail website. --Tagishsimon (talk) 09:12, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Using the coord template instead of the multimap postcode link

I propose that we drop the postcode column which provides links to multimap showing the approximate location, and replace it with the {{coord}} template based on the coordinates in individual station articles. Per The Anome's suggestion elsewhere, coords in articles are more accurate than postcode approximations. And {{coord}} links to the geohack page which enables the user to jump to the map of their choice, rather than being constrained to Bing (which has swallowed up multimap).

Any thoughts on the proposal welcome. thanks. --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:32, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Suggest we retain the post code column as useful for satnav usage where you input a postcode as a destination. Keith D (talk) 22:58, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Another though, would be good to as an O/S reference column to this as well and link to Geohack from that rather than have actual co-ords in the table. Keith D (talk) 23:01, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

I'd like to go with that, unlinked postcodes & gbmapping to geohack with an OS reference. I am neutral on lat & long. It would be even better if there was one codebase used to populate both this list & the infoboxes on the station pages. --Robert EA Harvey (talk) 11:38, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Multimap is defunct

The maps postcode links now re-direct to Bing Maps, so any mention of Multimap should be changed to Bing Maps. The multimap site itself even says "Multimap is now Bing Maps". — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mphammer (talk • contribs) 10:05, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

I have updated the header template {{Ukrshdr}} that provides the table header row for this and the B stations article. It looks like someone started converting the series of articles over to using templates rather than the table code but only did A & B. May be now is an appropriate time to finish the job and convert the remaining articles for ease of maintenance in the future. Keith D (talk) 20:52, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

List isn't complete, does not show all the codes that National Rail website can use

List isn't complete, does not show all the codes that National Rail website can use

The major source of missing codes are former rail stations, some of which still receive a railway operated/timetabled "Parliamentary" bus service, or used to in the past and haven't been removed from the data set.

Two examples are Dereham Coach/Bus (DEB)--which does have timetabled service (from LNER) and working departure board on National Rail (and appears in open data so sites like Realtimetrains also show the timetabled service), and Hunstanton Bus (HUS) which doesn't currently have a service.

Needs to be a cross comparison to other sources of the 3 letter codes to find the missing ones. Probably this list (CRS codes), but need to process the page to find the differences (the bus/coach ones can be found by "find in page" in a browser for the words "bus" and "coach")