Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Chesham branch/archive1


 * The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted by Karanacs 14:30, 21 July 2011.

Chesham branch

 * Nominator(s): –  iridescent  12:32, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

The Chesham branch (aka "that thing in the top corner of the tube map") is one of those curious anomalies which has no good reason to exist, but whose incongruousness people take for granted because it's existed for so long. It was opened in the 19th century as the first stage of a railway line from London to Birmingham and Manchester. The route was promptly changed, leaving the completed section of the original route as a small isolated stub of railway serving a single town. Despite being neither (a) anywhere near London nor (b) underground, a string of quirks of ownership meant that instead of becoming part of British Rail it ended up as part of the London Underground, who spent 70 years unsuccessfully trying to find a pretext to get rid of it.

As far as I'm aware this covers every significant source. One of the sources used (Clive Foxell's Chesham Shuttle) is technically a self-published source, but it's not a typical guy-in-the-basement operation; Foxell is the author of one of the two definitive histories of the Metropolitan Railway, and self-publishes supplements covering certain aspects in more detail than can be included in the main book. – iridescent  12:32, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Source review - spotchecks not done. Nikkimaria (talk) 14:56, 11 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Jones 2010 or 1974?
 * FN 68, 105: page(s)?
 * Location for Wilson & Spick? Nikkimaria (talk) 14:56, 11 July 2011 (UTC)


 * 1974, but for some reason I'd left it out of the bibliography—now fixed; (adding) I see what happened now; at one point I'd used two different books by Jones, eliminated the citations to one of them but removed the listing for the other one in the bibliography.
 * Douglas Rose's The London Underground: A Diagrammatic History is published in chapbook format (e.g. one giant poster-size sheet folded up and bound into a cover—think gas-station roadmap if you're not familiar with the almost-obsolete chapbook format) and thus doesn't have page numbers as such, just a front and back. The Bucks Herald is from a clipping, which contains the date but not the page number; if that's causing a problem I can re-cite it to something else (that special trains still run to Quainton Road but it's not in general use isn't in dispute);
 * London; fixed. – iridescent  16:32, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Comments: I see that the GA review was carried out by David Cane, so I don't doubt the article's historical and technical accuracy. I can't support its promotion at the moment, though, because of issues relating (a) to general prose and (b) to relevance - some of the included material seems to me to be hardly related, if at all, to the Chesham branch line. Here is a fairly exhaustive list of my main points of concern:-
 * "under way" is two words
 * I don't think "(pronounced /ˈtʃɛsəm/)" is necessary; "Chesham" is pronounced as it sounds.
 * "almost three times more to buy in Chesham than to buy in Berkhamsted" needs rephrasing: "almost three times as much to buy in Chesham as in Berkhamsted".
 * Why is "Watford" a redlink? There is an article.
 * I am a bit confused by this: "[T]he line between Harpenden and Boxmoor eventually opened in 1877.[15] (The Harpenden–Boxmoor section was never completed; trains to Boxmoor terminated nearby at Heath Park Halt, and passengers to and from Boxmoor had to complete their journey by horse or horse-drawn bus.)" It would be better to clarify that the Harpenden and Boxmoor line partially opened in 1877.
 * "Watkin turned his attention to the proposal to link to Aylesbury." Link what to Aylesbury?
 * General point: the habit of inserting parenthetical asides into the text is a bit annoying. I'd get rid of the parentheses, and either absorb the comments into the text or relegate them to footnotes.
 * "As the train pulled into Chesham, it was greeted by celebratory gunfire as it drew into the town..." Note the duplication of phrasing
 * "...but a fast trains each morning..." ?
 * "The opening of the railway dramatically ended Chesham's isolation" Whose view is being expressed here?
 * Perhaps explain why the Metropolitan Railway C Class locomotives performed poorly on the London-Aylesbury line. Was it the gradient?
 * In the Opening of the Aylesbury line section, I don't think the final paragraph is relevant to the Chesham branch line (nor is much of the detail in the preceding paragraph).
 * Please consider this monster sentence, and see if you can split it, probably into three sentences: "On 30 July 1898 John Bell, General Manager of the Metropolitan Railway, took control of the Quainton Road signal box himself and refused to allow a GCR train onto MR-owned tracks on the grounds that it was scheduled to take the Great Western rather than the Metropolitan route south of Aylesbury,[74] while on one occasion in 1901 King Edward VII was travelling home after visiting a friend in Wendover; the MR signalman allowed a slow goods train to run in front of the royal train, causing the King to arrive late back in London.[75]
 * There are further issues of relevance in the Relations with the Great Central Railway section, much of which has no direct connection with the Chesham branch line but is rather more general railway history. I believe that much of this information could be summarised or left out.
 * "1915 the extremely effective Metro-land advertising campaign..." Says who?
 * "With the profits generated, the line was further electrified as far as Rickmansworth." When did this happen?
 * "...it suffered two significant accidents in this period". Not clear what "this period" refers to.
 * London Transport section. Again, the text needs to be kept on-topic. The first two paragraphs make no mention of the Chesham line.
 * "...and the line was operated entirely as a shuttle service." Not clear from the context what is meant by "the line".
 * On nationalisation, the LPTB was already in public ownership in 1948 so it is wrong to imply that it was nationalised along with the railway companies
 * "Sunday services on the branch were abolished as a cost-cutting measure, although this decision was reversed following protests." This would be more sensibly worded: "A decision to abolish Sunday services on the branch as a cost-cutting measure was reversed following protests."
 * "The Greater London Council was scheduled for abolition..." Tie this to a year. It's a while since you mentioned 1986.
 * "The Chesham branch was proposed as a terminus for the original Crossrail scheme, which would have seen Crossrail trains running from Paddington to serve the stations between Rickmansworth and Aylesbury and the Chesham branch, allowing London Transport to withdraw from Buckinghamshire and cut the Metropolitan line back to serve only the branches to Watford and Uxbridge." Unwieldly, please split.

I'll be happy to look again when these points are resolved, but I'd advise you to ping me. Brianboulton (talk) 18:53, 12 July 2011 (UTC) Mystery: I posted the above comments five days ago, and would have expected some response before now. Or at least an acknowledgement. Nominators don't normally disappear during their FACs; is something amiss? Brianboulton (talk) 15:07, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Iridescent's been gone again for a week. There were problems recently with his account, so these may have reoccurred.--DavidCane (talk) 22:59, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
 * If that was the case you'd expect a simple notification, using an IP account if necessary, to keep us in the picture. If he's not going to respond there's no point in keeping the article here. Brianboulton (talk) 09:11, 20 July 2011 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.