Talk:Edinburgh Suburban and Southside Junction Railway

Recently, but undated
The text at present says "CRAG have recently been campaigning for the re-opening of the South Suburban line to passenger rail services."

But the citation is from 2007. That is not "recently".

I don't like putting "Dubious" in the face of an article, but I wondered if anyone with better knowledge than me could either update the assertion, or if it is dead, just delete it ... ? Afterbrunel (talk) 16:08, 28 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Well spotted; I have updated the dead references with links to the Web Archive - always a great resource for dealing with dead URLs. Correspondingly I changed the tenses to make the text a bit less recent-sounding. Hope it helps.Cnbrb (talk) 20:41, 28 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Thanks for this. Afterbrunel (talk) 06:57, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

Article needs improvement
There are still a lot of issues in this article. They start in the first and second lines, where the article title has Southside as one word and the intro has it as two. There are numerous misleading present tenses, for example "Today the suburban line remains heavily used for freight" which turns out to be referenced to Mullay's 1991 book, so 24 years ago.

We have a "History" section and then we move on to "Function" which also includes early history, and then lurches to the uncited "Network Rail currently licences sixty-one freight train journeys daily". When was that written? (It's "licenses" anyway.)

But the most bizarre issue is that Maclean's heavyweight book on the line has not been used. At all.

I will have a go at these issues; meanwhile could someone have a look at updating the "Campaign for re-opening" section? OK, a group suggested some improvements in 2003, and they were not adopted. That is now ancient history. (Several of the citations here are dead, by the way.) We might wish it was going to happen (and it might), but if CRAG have lost interest, it is not the purpose of Wikipedia articles to sustain a deferred proposal.

Oh, and "In January 2013, Network Rail announced that it was intending to electrify the line in the next control period (2014-19)". I am writing this in August 2015 and I can't find any reference to that. If NR have changed their mind, then this sentence does nothing to add credibility to this important Wikipedia article. And why is it tucked away under "Campaign for re-opening"? Afterbrunel (talk) 19:27, 8 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Fair enough, I think you have some clear ideas for improvement and should press ahead as you see fit. I do think that some detail of the proposals for re-opening should be retained - even though it's "ancient history" it is an interesting record of local politics and transport history, especially in the context of the eventual development of Edinburgh Trams. Thanks for your editorial interest in this article though..Cnbrb (talk) 12:58, 9 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Thanks; I'll bear that in mind.


 * I wondered if anyone had access to MacLean, A (1991). A History of the Railways in the Edinburgh District. Edinburgh: Ravenswood which is cited in the article. It was referenced here before 2009 (the earliest the "history" page goes to), so I can't trace the original editor who cited it. I can't find it in google books, nor on the National Library of Scotland catalogue, nor in Abebooks or Amazon or Ebay. Afterbrunel (talk) 06:57, 10 August 2015 (UTC)


 * I have just noticed that someone has added a Category to this called Beeching Closures in Scotland. The local passenger service was discontinued before Beeching. Why, oh why do people do that? :-)


 * (In fact I don't see the point of Categories at all; why would anyone want to read about all the "Companies disestablished in 1885", I wonder.) Afterbrunel (talk) 10:46, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

I've had a shot at improving this article. Afterbrunel (talk) 17:02, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

Partial rewrite of "Proposals for restoring passenger services"
I have done some substantial editing on this section, partly to meet some (by no means all) of the criticism mentioned above. I have tried to bring the story up to date (as of 2024), and have added several more examples of various initiatives in favour of a reopening. But I'm aware that there are still some gaps here, and would welcome any further edits from knowledgeable editors.

I have also adjusted the name of the subsection, changing "Campaigns" to "Proposals", which seems to be more appropriate. And rightly or wrongly I have promoted it to a sub-section in its own right, rather than a sub-sub-section of "History". If anyone disagrees with those decisions, feel free to edit accordingly. Mike Marchmont (talk) 16:37, 12 January 2024 (UTC)