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On-train automated information

FYI, Talk:London Underground 1996 Stock#Announcements. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:49, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Hammersmith & City colour

Can anybody get anything useful from ref at London Underground? All I get is "downloading", then nothing happens. What I need is the official LU name for the colour of the Hammersmith & City line, with which I can either add a ref for these edits by Louisa Young (talk · contribs), or revert them. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:45, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

Since the source is just verifying the standard colour for a line on a tube map, why not just cite http://content.tfl.gov.uk/standard-tube-map.pdf ? I can't believe anyone would consider it original research to argue about the colour being "pink" over "purple". Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 10:52, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

It doesn't name the colours. Those are not the disputed colours either, which are salmon-pink vs mauve. Now mauve, to me, means the original aniline dye invented by William Perkin some 160 years ago, somewhat darker and bluer than the H&C line colour. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:11, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

LU used "pink" when the H&C was split from the Met on the maps—London was flooded with "What's the difference between the Metropolitan and the Hammersmith & City? The Hammersmith & City is pink" posters. (They just use the Pantone code and CMYK figures in the official standards.) Books on underground consistently also use "pink" to describe the H&C (e.g. pink was chosen as a clear, contrasting colour for the Hammersmith & City Line, and orange for the East London Line Roberts, Maxwell J. (2005). Underground Maps After Beck. London: Capital Transport. p. 57. ISBN 1854142860.). ‑ Iridescent 21:31, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

Shall I revert the edits to Hammersmith & City line then? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:10, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

It's not a mauve, but it's greyer and lighter than salmon pink. The TfL Signs Manual calls it "Underground Pink", so that would satisfy as to "pinkness". The TfL Colour Standard defines it as Pantone 197 or R244 G169 B190 (which is different from what Pantone gives as the equivalent for its colour (R232 G156 B174). I would just change it to "pale pink".--DavidCane (talk) 00:32, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Sainted stations - "St." or "St"

Despite it being more usual in modern British punctuation of abbreviations to only use a full-stop if the end of the word is omitted, TfL has generally stuck to the older convention of placing a full-stop after "St" as the abbreviation of Saint in the names of King's Cross St. Pancras, St. John's Wood, St James's Park and St. Paul's on the Underground map.

User:Chaotic Doire pointed-out at Talk:King's Cross St. Pancras tube station, that the article title is different from what is shown on the current tube map. The change seems have been made with this current (December 2017) edition of the tube map. The most recent map I could find with the full-stop was the Tube maps with tunnels map which was published in July 2017 and is still on the TfL website with full stops.

The punctuation section of the TfL style guide (html and pdf versions) from October 2017 does say in the punctuation section on full-stops that "It is no longer used after abbreviations, so use Mr not Mr.". This seems to be the basis of the change, though the guide still gives "St. James's Park station", though that is listed to ensure correct punctuation of the apostrophe and possessive "s".

This change does not seem to be universally applied for publications yet (see [1], [2]). Signage at stations is still likely to contain "St." for a very long time. The question is: should we change the article names? --DavidCane (talk) 13:18, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

London Underground post-war bibliog

Hello Group: can you help with some suggested / required reading, preferably relating to the 1950s, if it's possible to be that specific? Many thanks! Incidentally, yes, I'm getting stuff from some current articles' refs, but I'm guessing you probably know much more... Cheers! >SerialNumber54129^{...speculates} 12:51, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

​On the contrary, "relating to the 1950s" is hopelessly vague—the London Underground is a huge topic (Ottley's Bibliography of British Railway History lists well over 20,000 books about British railways, and the London Underground is one of the most popular topics within that). What type of thing are you looking for; 1950s rolling stock, 1950s station design, the mass closures of stations and branch lines in the 1950s, electrification, the dismissal of (tube map designer) Harry Beck, the planning of the Victoria Line…? If you're looking for a general crash course for beginners in London Transport, then The Subterranean Railway by Christian Wolmar is your best bet; for the specifics of how the system was built, you want Building London's Underground - From Cut and Cover to Crossrail by Antony Badsey-Ellis; for a feel of how the system has grown over time and how UERL/LU/LUL's corporate identities have changed, then if you don't mind forking out a few quid Capital Transport's map trilogy (No Need to Ask! by David Leboth and Tim Demuth, Mr Beck's Underground Map by Ken Garland, and Underground Maps After Beck by Maxwell Roberts) is excellent not just as a history of cartography but as a general primer to the growth and shrinkage of the system and to the internal politics that drove it. Most of them are out of print but Mike Horne's series on the histories of the individual lines are also a good starting point.

Remember also that the 1950s was pre-Beeching, and thus as well as the familiar Underground network London was also criss-crossed with a huge spiderweb of British Railways passenger lines, the underground freight routes inherited from the Metropolitan Railway, and various trams and trolleybuses. There was never a full diagrap published in this era, but this sketch by Beck shows the London rail network in 1938, which was very little different to that of the 1950s.

If you're after something specific, then if you live anywhere near London or Birmingham then by far your best bet is to go to Ian Allan (45 Lower Marsh, immediately down the steps from the platform 1 end of Waterloo, or 12 Ethel Street, about halfway between New Street Station and Birmingham City Hall), and just browse the shelves, since if a book is about trains and currently in print they'll stock it. ‑ Iridescent 14:37, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

@Iridescent: Brilliant, great stuff. As usual, you pile in with bovver boots full of information  ;) I wanted to do something with this at some point. I asked for the 50s thinking that to ask for this would be far too precise, as a bibliog. A quick search didn't bring anything up devoted solely to it, so I thought I'd have to mine the broader period. What you think? Incidentally, like the tube map. In fact, it's more or less the later Network Connections map, eh? So poor ole HB got ripped off by BR as well as LT  :) >SerialNumber54129^{...speculates} 15:01, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

My go to source on Tube stations is The Story of London's Underground by John R Day (and I think a few other editors feel the same), it seems to work well for the basic facts you need to use it as a source. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 15:31, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

The Network Connections map was designed by Tim Demuth, who also designed what became the modern tube map in the wake of Hutchinson's disastrous redesign. Despite TfL's history-rewriting, Harry Beck's influence on the present-day tube map wasn't particularly significant. Where he was important is introducing the system of evenly spaced stations and only using verticals, horizontals and 45° angles which is still in use (although even that wasn't his idea but was pinched from George Dow's maps for the LNER), but his map designs are generally fairly unusable—he was obsessed with symmetry and with eliminating diagonals, and consequently his maps distort geography so wildly they're very difficult to navigate with. I occasionally consider doing something to make Tube map less of an embarrassment, but it would be a thankless task since (as with any topic where the popular version of history doesn't match the actual version of history) it's a topic on which a lot of people would be trying to make good-faith "improvements". ‑ Iridescent 16:37, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

Why though did TfL re-write history in such a way as to make themselves look bad? That story that they paid Beck f-all for an iconic etc., etc.? Incidentally, all this talk of maps reminds me of an "early effort" where I bluelinked something for this very project. How time does fly. >SerialNumber54129^{...speculates} 16:56, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

I haven't read Tube map in detail to give an informed opinion, but if it's in this state, I can't really fault you for wanting to get a more accurate version of events. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 17:07, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict) The "they paid Beck f-all for an iconic etc" bit isn't really true; he got a 5 guinea bonus for the original design, which isn't millions but wasn't chickenfeed either in 1933 (about £300–400 in modern terms). Throughout his career Beck was both an LPTB employee and a freelancer, so he actually earned more than any of his colleagues as he was being paid for the maps on top of his draughtsman's salary. The reason he was shown the door in 1960 wasn't because he was making unreasonable pay demands, but because he repeatedly refused Publicity Office requests to stop trying to force everything onto a rectilinear grid. There are multiple reasons for the subsequent rewriting of history; the main one is that the prosaic one that it's good for sales (TfL makes more money from licencing the tube map and roundel than they do from tube fares), but the whole "we were pioneers" narrative suits them better than "we copied what other railway companies were already doing", and there's also the cynical argument that crediting everything to Beck (who sold all claims to copyright to LPTB) is insurance against other designers who want royalties for their input to subsequent designs. Ken Garland's biography is well worth a read if you want to know more than you ever wanted about how Beck came to draw the maps, why he was unceremoniously dumped in the run-up to the Victoria Line opening, and what happened next. ‑ Iridescent 17:15, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

Cheers-sounds fun; have nabbed it amazonally ("Amazones 1-6", of course-!). But I see what you mean- he was a career man, a good one, and got paid for it. As you say, it keeps the whole narrative inhouse doesn't it. Beck to mundanity, anything else about the Stratford crash I should be considering, do you think? >SerialNumber54129^{...speculates} 17:44, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

For the Central Line you want DavidCane. As far as I can tell it doesn't even get mentioned in The Twopenny Tube which is the only specifically Central Line book I have to hand. If you can get hold of the London Railway Record archives, they'll almost certainly have run a piece on it—they love their crashes. Unfortunately, their online index is so poor as to be worthless. ‑ Iridescent 17:51, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

I see it is... have emailed them to ask, that should repay something at least. Thanks for all the info, it's greatly appreciated. >SerialNumber54129^{...speculates} 18:18, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

Try these:

• Lee, Charles Edward (May 1970). Seventy Years of the Central. Westminster: London Transport. ISBN 0-85329-013-X.
• Bruce, J. Graeme; Croome, Desmond F. (1996). The Twopenny Tube: The Story of the Central Line. Harrow Weald: Capital Transport. ISBN 1-85414-186-4.

I have a feeling that Oakwood Press (possibly via their Locomotion Papers imprint) did a book on the Central London Railway, but I can't track it down. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:56, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

Cheers, Redrose64, I'll hunt then or / track them down. And thanks to everyone for your suggestions, I appreciate them. >SerialNumber54129^{...speculates} 07:42, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

I can't see anything about the Stratford crash on a (quick) skim of The Twopenny Tube. If you're in London, the LT Museum library is also a good bet for things like this—about half the collection is indexed here. ‑ Iridescent 17:26, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

The "Twopenny Tube" was updated with a second edition in 2006 as part of the Capital Transport "An Illustrated History" series - "The Central Line An Illustrated History" (ISBN: 1-85414-297-6). There's nothing about the Stratford crash in it either.--DavidCane (talk) 17:52, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

Underground stations on Wikidata with related surface stations

Hi! I've recently been doing some work on the Wikidata items for LU stations, and the connections between them, to make it possible to extract network graphs such as eg this tinyurl.com/yc3zb2nz for the Piccadilly line, and also as a step towards making it possible for Wikipedias that wish to to use Wikidata to fill their 'adjacent stations' templates at the bottom of station articles.

In the process, I have come across the following issue:

• If there's a station that is both an Underground station and a surface-rail / heavy-rail station, when does it make sense to one item on Wikidata, and when does it make sense to have two?
  -- i.e. when does it make sense to put the information solely related to the Underground station into its own additional Wikidata item?

Doing this makes it possible for a Wikipedia to have its own article on just the Underground station, as eg we do for Euston tube station, Paddington tube station (Circle and Hammersmith & City lines) or Paddington tube station (Bakerloo, Circle and District lines). (This requires a separate Wikidata item).

It also makes it slightly easier if one wants to have two infoboxes that are Wikidata-fed, one for each part of the station, in a single article; or different entries in a single infobox, that distinguish between the two. (Although this can also be done using just a single item, by marking the relevance of each statement appropriately).

So my question is: are there stations for which it would not be appropriate to break out the Underground-part information in this way? -- eg because it simply doesn't make sense given their physical structure, or how they are considered centrally, or because it just makes more sense to consider them as a single unit.

For example, on some parts of the network, eg the Bakerloo line between Queens Park station (England) and Harrow & Wealdstone station, the two services physically use the same tracks and the same ticket gates. Even when this is not the case, some interchanges are very tightly integrated, eg Whitechapel station or Canada Water station or Willesden Junction station.

The following is a list of stations that currently have specific Wikidata items for their Underground component, many split out by a Hungarian editor in August last year, though there is only a single article here on English Wikipedia. Wikis with articles on both are shown, based on this query: tinyurl.com/y8da3o9k.

• [[Blackfriars tube station (Q16039690)]] vs Blackfriars station -- [[Cannon Street station (Q21436549)]] vs Cannon Street station -- Finsbury Park railway station (Q34615026) vs Finsbury Park station -- [[Highbury & Islington station (Q34615922)]] vs Highbury & Islington station -- [[Liverpool Street tube station (Q34540678)]] vs Liverpool Street station -- [[London Bridge tube station (Q11762492)]] vs London Bridge station -- [[Marylebone tube station (Q3296287)]] vs Marylebone station -- [[Victoria tube station (Q3090826)]] vs London Victoria station.

The following had also been split out, but I re-merged them before I realised what was going on

• Balham station Balham tube station (Q35127912); Blackhorse Road station Blackhorse Road station (Q34612787); Kentish Town station Kentish Town station (Q35118888); Tottenham Hale station Tottenham Hale station (Q34613376); Vauxhall station Vauxhall tube station (Q34609392); Moorgate station Moorgate station (Q22070175)

Going forward, in which of these cases would it be useful to split out the Underground station information in a separate item, capable of supporting a separate infobox or a separate article on some Wiki? Which would more appropriately sit with everything in a single item? Are there other stations, where it would be useful/appropriate to split out the Underground information in a separate item? Jheald (talk) 12:34, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

Just to add, for the record, the following are the stations where we currently do have separate articles for the main line and underground stations:

• Charing Cross railway station -> Charing Cross tube station; Euston railway station -> Euston tube station; London King's Cross railway station / St Pancras railway station -> King's Cross St. Pancras tube station; London Paddington station -> Paddington tube station (Bakerloo, Circle and District lines) / Paddington tube station (Circle and Hammersmith & City lines); London Waterloo station -> Waterloo tube station

The following remaining London station group stations are currently combined with their corresponding Underground station in a single article/item both here and on Wikidata:

• Moorgate station, Old Street station, Vauxhall station.

So also is Stratford station -- Jheald (talk) 23:20, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

Project discussion on Wikidata at d:Wikidata_talk:WikiProject_Railways#Bonnie_and_Clyde_on_the_London_Underground Jheald (talk) 12:41, 6 February 2018 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK Railways notified of discussion. ( Section). Jheald (talk) 23:34, 6 February 2018 (UTC)
Pinging @Kemenymate: for information. Jheald (talk) 12:41, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

Discussion invited

Here is a little what if to broaden the discussion. When the last train goes but the tube is running, gates are extended across the foot tunnels- there is a physical division. The divide come between the bit maintained by one contractor and the bit maintained by another (lets say Carillion and Capita to keep it current!). STP has three bits above the ground: Network Southeast, EastMidlands and Eurostar and steps leading below the ground to shallow lines and deep lines. With a legal hat on all these are separate entities. Should WP consider a station to be bricks and mortar, or the legal identity? Hasn't Wikidata the duty to take the metaview- while (en) can focus on the bit we enjoy? ClemRutter (talk) 10:41, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

To be clear, Wikidata hasn't split most of the items (yet), and probably won't, unless either (a) some particular Wiki wants to have two different articles; or (b) some particular editor makes it their crusade to do so. Until then, it's likely we'll muddle along as we are. I don't see a particularly pressing need to split the data for eg Moorgate station or Old Street station into two, when the two lines run right alongside each other; albeit Clem may be right that gates get closed at particular times. I think the St Pancras example underlines just how far one could take this if one really wanted to -- but IMO it's only really useful if one has lots of data that wants to distinguish values for between the different entities. If it's just different values for operator (P137), without anything else being contingent on that, that probably makes more sense to all accommodate in a single item, at least until there's other data that depends on it.

One thing I do wonder about, where we do have eg Liverpool Street station (Q801124) for the station as a whole, and Liverpool Street tube station (Q34540678) for the tube station, is what to do about Crossrail? Is that more part of the main station, or more part of the Underground? Or will it need to get another item, just for itself? Jheald (talk) 11:32, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Track maps for stations?

I wanted to get everyone's thoughts on the possibility of adding track maps to tube stations with complex layouts (e.g. Earls Court), similar to what's already at Acton Town and in Hong Kong MTR and New York City Subway station articles. The sources would be this map from TfL, and this to-scale replica by a private individual. epicgenius (talk) 14:28, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

If it goes ahead, I'd strongly object to trying to do it using RDTs, as has been done at Acton Town tube station. You can just about get away with something like this at Acton Town because the tracks are all parallel, but even there it's virtually useless to the reader, and for somewhere like Kings Cross where you have perpendicular tracks, resited platforms and assorted interchanges going in and out of use, any RDT would end up looking like the wiring diagram for a space shuttle engine. If we're going to have track layout plans, draw schematics in Inkscape so readers have a fighting chance of understanding which line is which (see File:First Quainton Road station layout.png, File:Map-ElyUKRailwayJunctions.jpg, File:Midland Railway Langley Mill.jpg or File:Hellingly station layout.png for an idea of what I mean). Remember, Wikipedia exists to serve its readers, not its editors, and all but the most simple RDTs are incomprehensible to most readers. ‑ Iridescent 16:46, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

I know that the RDT would be hard to understand, and it's used mostly because it's easier to maintain. If we are going to draw Inkscape maps, these should be SVG files, rather than PNG/JPGs, since SVG don't lose their quality when you zoom in. (So for example, I would prefer File:Battersbystationlayout.svg over File:Battersbystationlayout.png - except with tracks in both diagrams.) epicgenius (talk) 18:07, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

Where there is a useful purpose to having a diagram, they may be appropriate, but we don't need them for every station and they shouldn't be seen as required. A few years ago, we removed a load of platform layouts that had been built using table formatting because they were effectively reproducing the succession boxes. Although a skilled template specialist can produce some wonderfully sophisticated layouts, I agree with Iridescent that using RDT templates should be avoided as much as possible and the examples he gives are excellent. I did platform/track layout graphics for South Kensington and Gloucester Road stations many years ago to illustrate how significantly different the original layout was from the current. I also did platform diagrams for Down Street, Aldwych and Holborn and Hounslow West to show how the station layouts used to be. These were all more illustrative then diagrammatic, but I agree they should be done as .svg (some of my early ones are .png because they were produced in Microsoft Publisher which can't export to an .svg format). If created in Inkscape they need to be saved as standard .svg as Inkscape's version causes some incompatibility with text.--DavidCane (talk) 17:20, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Proposal to retitle London Transport portal

Editors here may wish to be aware that there is a proposal to move Portal:London Transport here. Bermicourt (talk) 19:36, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

This has now been carried out - it is now Portal:London transport.--DavidCane (talk) 21:28, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

WikiProject collaboration notice from the Portals WikiProject

The reason I am contacting you is because there are one or more portals that fall under this subject, and the Portals WikiProject is currently undertaking a major drive to automate portals that may affect them.

Portals are being redesigned.

The new design features are being applied to existing portals.

At present, we are gearing up for a maintenance pass of portals in which the introduction section will be upgraded to no longer need a subpage. In place of static copied and pasted excerpts will be self-updating excerpts displayed through selective transclusion, using the template {{Transclude lead excerpt}}.

The discussion about this can be found here.

Maintainers of specific portals are encouraged to sign up as project members here, noting the portals they maintain, so that those portals are skipped by the maintenance pass. Currently, we are interested in upgrading neglected and abandoned portals. There will be opportunity for maintained portals to opt-in later, or the portal maintainers can handle upgrading (the portals they maintain) personally at any time.

Background

On April 8th, 2018, an RfC ("Request for comment") proposal was made to eliminate all portals and the portal namespace. On April 17th, the Portals WikiProject was rebooted to handle the revitalization of the portal system. On May 12th, the RfC was closed with the result to keep portals, by a margin of about 2 to 1 in favor of keeping portals.

There's an article in the current edition of the Signpost interviewing project members about the RfC and the Portals WikiProject.

Since the reboot, the Portals WikiProject has been busy building tools and components to upgrade portals.

So far, 84 editors have joined.

If you would like to keep abreast of what is happening with portals, see the newsletter archive.

If you have any questions about what is happening with portals or the Portals WikiProject, please post them on the WikiProject's talk page.

Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   10:59, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

I'm already signed-up.--DavidCane (talk) 21:57, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

BOAC Flight 712

A discussion is ongoing at Talk:BOAC Flight 712#Katz which members of this Wikiproject are invited to contribute to. Mjroots (talk) 15:14, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

Annual review

Since 30 September 2017, the project has added 74 articles, 8 good articles and two new featured articles. Membership has increased by 3, but active users have reduced by 4.

	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017	2018
Participants	9	47	69	77	84 (46 active)	80 (40 active)	84 (45 active)	85 (36 active)	86 (32 active)	91 (28 active)	93 (30 active)	94 (31 active)	97 (27 active)
Articles Assessed	0	1,415	1,714	2,153	2,656	2,830	2,933	2,996	3,021	3,311	3,369	3,856	3,930
Good Articles	0	4	5	10	21	24	27	31	33	44	59	79	87
Featured Articles	1	1	4	10	24	31	33	33	33	33	33	34	36
Statistics are for 30 September in each year.

--DavidCane (talk) 15:49, 6 October 2018 (UTC)