User talk:Slambo/Archives/2022/July

Administrators' newsletter – July 2022
News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2022).

Administrator changes
 * Gnome-colors-list-remove.svg AA • Gwalla • Ioeth • Laurascudder • Moriori (deceased) • Nat • Rfl
 * Pictogram voting rename.png →

Bureaucrat changes
 * Gnome-colors-list-add.svg Lee Vilenski



Interface administrator changes
 * Gnome-colors-list-add.svg Nihiltres

Technical news
 * is a new variable that can be used in abuse filters to avoid affecting globally active users.

Arbitration
 * An arbitration case regarding conduct in deletion-related editing has been opened.

Miscellaneous
 * The New Pages Patrol queue has around 10,000 articles to be reviewed. As all administrators have the patrol right, please consider helping out. The queue is here. For further information on the state of the project, see the latest NPP newsletter.

Discuss this newsletter

Subscribe

Archive Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:29, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

Union Pacific Railroad
Hello Slambo - I have noticed what I believe is some bias on the Union Pacific Railroad (UP) page, and am interested to know what you think about it. The article has a pretty big section called Notable accidents and then a section called Environmental record. That negativity is not presented on the page of UP's biggest rival, BNSF Railway, which has a small Safety section that is mostly positive. The east coast railroad Norfolk Southern Railway has nothing about accidents, and its Environmental record has positive and negative information. The other large east coast railroad, CSX Transportation, has nothing about the environment. It does have a simple list of accidents and incidents. I believe there should be some type of standard template that should be followed. This would help prevent people with biased opinions about certain railroads from editing articles to make a railroad look worse or better than it is. Safety statistics from the Federal Railroad Administration should be used, and updated each year. Right now, the UP page makes that railroad look like it is a danger to society, while BNSF appears to be a much safer railroad. If everyone had FRA statistics on their page, it would be much more fair. TwoScars (talk) 17:29, 11 June 2022 (UTC)


 * Hmm... Thanks for pointing it out. I'll take a look but can't really dig into it for a little while with my work assignments this month.  I was out of town with family this weekend, and have a couple pretty intense work days coming up in the next few weeks.  Please feel free to check in with other frequent railroad history editors as well.  There hasn't been a lot of activity on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Trains recently, but it would be good to mention this there.
 * A consistent approach would be helpful and my initial thought is that the FRA is a good starting point. However, even though they have been a frequent recipient of a Harriman Award, there is some discussion on that article as well of the UP underreporting accident data.  I'll see what I can find.
 * Slambo (Speak) 02:13, 13 June 2022 (UTC)
 * I put a comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Trains. I think the current BNSF page could be a good template for all Class I railroads. I noticed BNSF has nothing under the Finance section. I assume this is because they are owned by B-H instead of having a separate 10-K. The Surface Transportation Board has some stats here. The STB Annual Report Form R-1, in addition to a Balance Sheet and Income Statement has an equipment section (Schedule 710), Track (Schedule 700), and service units such as ton-miles (Schedule 755). The STB defines a railroad slightly different than the 10-K entity, but the reporting is consistent. CN and CP report to the STB only their US operations. TwoScars (talk) 21:30, 28 June 2022 (UTC)
 * I have not had a chance to really dig into this yet with all the travel I've been doing for work in the last month. Summer is busier for my business than the rest of the year.  I will try to take a closer look soon, but I'm not certain that I will be able to really dive in as far as is needed. Slambo (Speak)  11:02, 12 July 2022 (UTC)

Nomination of Short Line Railroad of the Year for deletion
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Short Line Railroad of the Year is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Articles for deletion/Short Line Railroad of the Year until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article until the discussion has finished. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 20:38, 13 July 2022 (UTC)

Lists of locomotives
Hi, you commented long ago (in 2004!) at Talk:List of locomotives, and you mentioned "I've got a very long list at home that I've compiled of named steam locomotives that have operated on North American railroads. It is by no means complete. I can upload a sample of about a page worth of data to one of my talk pages, but just looking at North America, the list is quite extensive. UK railroads kept using locomotive names through dieselization and many diesel locomotives are also named, so such a list could potentially increase in length exponentially." Well, I am trying now to develop lists of preserved locomotives (e.g. at Draft:Preserved locomotives in the United States) and also of other significant individual locomotives (so probably the named ones you mention), in the U.S. and elsewhere. And yes these will be very long lists, split out into sublists. See Talk:List of locomotives and ongoing Articles for deletion/List of locomotives (2nd nomination) (which I think will be closed as Keep).

I wonder now, could you contribute the list you mention, perhaps to a subpage like Talk:List of locomotives/Named steam locomotives in North America compiled by Slambo or whatever, and/or contribute other lists? I'm glad to see you are still active in 2022 and thank you for your many contributions. sincerely, --Doncram (talk) 15:16, 12 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Well, I'm not as active as I want to be this year. Work is keeping me away from a lot of my volunteer projects.  I need to do a bit of refactoring with all of my projects soon so I can get back to the things I want to do.
 * I tried putting a bunch of the list onto my personal website, The Rip Track, but haven't had time to update that either recently (as is evidenced by the amount of server errors that are popping up on it and other pages I keep in my personal web space). I tried migrating to a newer version of the web software on a test site. That project hasn't moved much in several years, but it does have a copy of the list in the Railroad history section. Slambo (Speak)  03:15, 18 July 2022 (UTC)