Talk:LSWR suburban lines

Original author note
I have created this page to incorporate detail of the subject matter. A little of this is already in the London and South Western Railway article but it is obvious that it would become impossibly long if the additional detail (in course of being written!) were included there. The intention is to summarise this (suburban lines) article briefly on the main LSWR page, and provide a link to this page from there. Afterbrunel (talk) 19:39, 8 August 2013 (UTC)


 * This article has itself become very long. This makes it rather daunting and unattractive to readers unfamiliar with the subject matter. And they, after all, are our customers. I'm thinning out some of the extraneous material at present. I think that the LSWR electrification needs a much more thorough treatment in an article of its own. Afterbrunel (talk) 13:06, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
 * I came across this article today - just to say that I think it's a masterpiece, and the detail (on a subject with which I was only vaguely familar, only roughly knowing the area) was appreciated. I have no objections to tidying it up a bit (one or two sentences stuck out as odd - eg 'The LSWR allocated six of Beattie's 2-4-0WT locomotives to the new service' as a paragraph all of its own), but it would be a shame to lose the chronology, the narrative and the flow.  In particular the article is good about describing why things happened (politics etc), unlike most similar articles which just say what happened.
 * If length is an issue, perhaps it's worth splitting it up? Or maybe existing articles on individual lines already have that covered and the general narrative is better to have it on one place? Caliston (talk) 22:38, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Having mentioned Beattie's well tanks, we shouls also mention the various other locomotive classes that were designed specifically for the suburban work before electrification. Principal among these were the Adams 46, 415, T1 and O2 classes, also the Drummond M7 class. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 11:11, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

I am very grateful for Caliston's comment "In particular the article is good about describing why things happened (politics etc), unlike most similar articles which just say what happened." I think this is hugely important, and I hate those articles that are just lists with no explanation.

I hope someone else will expand the locomotives section with a grown-up summary. (Locomotives are not within my competence.) Some people get fixated on exceedingly obscure details of locomotives, ("What colour the splashers were painted" is explained somewhere) which are ok on a page dedicated to that class of locomtoive, but are unhelpful in this overview.

My vision for this page so far as network extensions are concerned, is for a five-line (typically) summary for each route here, linked to a full article dedicated to that route or group of routes.

The LSWR suburban electrification deserves far better than is allocated here, and I am currently writing a new article, once again leaving a brief summary here linking to it. The available literature on the electrification is now quite extensive, particularly Brown's two-volume blockbuster. Afterbrunel (talk) 08:49, 22 December 2022 (UTC)