Category talk:Disused railway stations in Renfrewshire

What belongs in this category?
I recently created Category:Disused railway stations in East Renfrewshire, moving from this category to there several stations whose locations are currently within the East Renfrewshire council area. At the same time I also moved some articles to Category:Disused railway stations in Inverclyde for the same reason.

Many of these changes have since been reverted by User:Pencefn with the rationale that, as these stations were in the county of Renfrewshire at the time of closure, they belong in this category. I understand that interpretation, but I believe it is a misguided one.

Firstly, convention tends towards categorisation by place in Scotland based on current council areas regardless of whether the subject of the article predates the 1996 reorganisation of local government. Thus, for example, John Dick (footballer born 1876) is in Category:People from East Renfrewshire.

Secondly, the existing category structure subdivides Category:Disused railway stations in Scotland by council areas (yes, I'm purposely avoiding for the moment the confused intersection of categories for both the Highland area and some old counties; let's sort that another day). This is despite the fact most closures occurred before 1996 and many of the local authority areas don't correspond.

So why should East Renfrewshire be treated differently? The problem, of course, lies in the existence of both an old county and a modern council area, both called "Renfrewshire". Pencefn's interpretation treats them as a continuing entity, although in my opinion that is misleading. The administrative county was abolished in 1975; the name wasn't used under the system of regions and districts. It only resurfaced in 1996, under a completely different system, applied to an area barely a third of the size of the county. Significantly, Wikipedia treats the two as distinct entities with separate articles, Renfrewshire for the council area, Renfrewshire (historic) for the county.

Had modern day Renfrewshire adopted, say, the name Renfrew from the district it largely succeeded, we wouldn't even need to have this debate. For the sake of consistency and logic, I propose categorising by the current local government system as this ties in with all the related category structures. Jellyman (talk) 23:40, 30 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I'd agree with that for consistency, as current boundaries ("Tees Valley" instead of "North Yorkshire" or "Cleveland", etc) are used for the England and Wales categories. – iride  scent  18:54, 31 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Revisiting this issue, I have moved the relevant articles back to the East Ren category given the lack of objections. User:Pencefn was never polite enough to respond to my querying his edits anyway. Jellyman (talk) 20:14, 4 September 2010 (UTC)