Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Roads/U.S. Route 66

Highway scope
Now that we have a few articles tagged, let's try to figure out what the scope of the highway articles should be.

Personally, I think only US 66 itself and the highways that replaced it should be in the scope. The three-digit X66 US highways should not be included. They're only related to US 66 because they end with 66. –Fredddie™ 14:48, 21 May 2011 (UTC)


 * I agree completely.  Imzadi 1979  →   14:54, 21 May 2011 (UTC)


 * When you say the highways that replaced US 66, do you mean I-55, I-44, etc. that bypassed or overlaid the U.S. highway, or the state highways that took over part of US 66's route, like K-66, CA 66, IL 4, etc.?  V C  21:56, 23 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Why not both? –Fredddie™ 23:31, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
 * At least for the former, I think this TF's role would be limited, just because US 66 doesn't play a huge role in the Interstates, for example. --Rschen7754 23:36, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Agreed. Perhaps just the state-detail interstates, such as I-55 (IL) or I-40 (NM). –Fredddie™ 05:41, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Confused
I tried to add Cars (film) to the U.S. Route 66 joint sub-project, but the banner was deleted from the talk page. Why? Powers T 23:46, 15 June 2011 (UTC)
 * It's not a USRD article. In order to add an article to the US 66 project, you need to only add *one* of the two project's banners to the talk page. For the article you mention, it fits better with the US History subproject, and so the USRD banner was removed. --Rschen7754 23:50, 15 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Rschen is exactly right. It's out of the scope of USRD, so I removed it.  We have edited the banner of the US History project so all the US 66 articles filter into the same set of assessment categories.  Thus, it's not necessary to double tag. –Fredddie™ 00:30, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, first of all, the project page clearly says "Any articles that are within the scope of this project should be tagged with the project banners of WikiProject U.S. Roads and WikiProject United States History." Second of all, I'm puzzled how it fits better under history -- being a movie from 2006 -- than under U.S. Roads.  Powers T 00:42, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Oops. That should have said "or". I agree that it's an odd fit in US History.  Is it worth asking a project to edit their banner for one movie? –Fredddie™ 01:17, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
 * What would need to be edited? Powers T 18:07, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Ideally, we would have a mini banner that we can put on one-off articles, like Cars. I'll ask someone who is knowledgeable about banners if it can be done easily. –Fredddie™ 22:00, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Route 66 (song) and Route 66 (TV series) would seem to be in a similar situation. There must be other examples as well.  Powers T 23:07, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

I assume The Grapes of Wrath would as well. I think we'll have a TF-only banner in place soon for articles that don't fit under USRD or USHIST, but do under US66.  Imzadi 1979  →   23:10, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Content section
I suggest we change the Content section header to be "Recognized content" to match the other subprojects and task forces. That way everyone can see what pages the groups is concerned with, and what may need to be added. — ★ Parsa ☞ talk 01:48, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Sounds good. We should get the recognized content bot going, too, if it isn't already. –Fredddie™ 01:55, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

Modern Associations and Museums
Just a thought for the revival section on the main 66 page... would it make sense to briefly discuss the modern 66 Associations (both US and foreign) in a bit more detail on the main page, then provide more detail on the Associations page? The work of the National 66 Federation and the various state organizations is responsible for a lot of preservation work that isn't discussed anywhere. Their newsletters and bulletins are secondary sources (periodicals). The Federation doesn't get mentioned at all. Neither do foreign Associations.

Also the museums should get mentioned somewhere, too. Here's a partial list of some (though there are certainly more now... small ones that I haven't compiled yet):

There's also the Route 66 Territory Museum in Rancho Cucamonga, CA and a museum in Lebanon, MO that don't seem to have web sites. — ★ Parsa ☞ talk 21:59, 26 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Illinois Route 66 Hall of Fame and Museum - Pontiac, IL
 * Standard Oil Gasoline Station (Odell, Illinois) — BTW, we should have a 66 template on this page's talk page...
 * Shea's Gas Station Museum (WP page: Shea's Gas Station Museum) – Springfield, IL – Needs 66 template
 * Oklahoma Route 66 Museum - Clinton, OK
 * National Route 66 Museum - Elk City, OK
 * The Devil's Rope Museum & The Texas Old Route 66 Museum - McLean, TX
 * Historic Route 66 Museum, The Powerhouse Visitors Center - Kingman, AZ
 * Barstow Route 66 Mother Road Museum in the Harvey House Railroad Depot (Casa del Desierto) - Barstow, CA
 * California Route 66 Museum (WP page:California Route 66 Museum) - Victorville, CA – Needs 66 template
 * San Bernardino Route 66 Museum - San Bernardino, CA


 * There's also a poorly-formatted page on the national route 66 association, National Historic Route 66 Federation. One other museum of note is the Museum of Transportation in St. Louis, Missouri which deals largely in non-road topics like railways (it has its own reporting mark) but does devote some coverage to 66, with exhibits of classic cars and of one unit of the now-demolished Coral Court Motel. We do have images for the Illinois 66 hall of fame (or can get them from free sources); Bob Waldmire's van is there, for instance.
 * There is, however, basically nothing for National Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program or its matching fund grants under the National Route 66 Preservation Bill (1999) beyond the briefest mention in Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 66.102.83.61 (talk) 16:14, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

National Register of Historic Places database?
Many articles on individual restored National Register of Historic Places properties link to " NRIS Database [dead link] National Register of Historic Places" as a source for the Infobox NRHP field data. On any individual page (like Sprague's Super Service) that means the first reference on the list is dead as these are in the infoboxes.

The data is on the archiplanet.org wiki, which seems to be some sort of rambot-like import of NRHP records with basically the same info we need for the infobox. (Similar data in non-wiki format is on another third-party site http://landmarkhunter.com/174325-blue-swallow-motel/ but again, not an official source.) Only one problem... a page like http://www.archiplanet.org/wiki/Blue_Swallow_Motel will link to a pair of .PDF's on nps.gov, but those documents (if retrieved directly) are useless placeholders saying the data is "not yet digitised". Where are the original sources?

Certainly there is an entire page of tourist info on nps.gov for each of the well-known NRHP-listed US 66 sites, but a http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/route66/spragues_super_service_normal.html style listing (despite being a well-written description of the site) doesn't provide the registration data for the infobox.

We could replace http://www.nr.nps.gov/nrloc1.htm &rarr; http://nrhp.focus.nps.gov but that just gives a search page, not a direct link to an individual database record. All I've been able to get is "No records found for current search. Please try again using another search or browse." from that page. The other option seems to be download of one huge spreadsheet http://www.nps.gov/history/nr/research/ has a download area at http://nrhp.focus.nps.gov/natreg/docs/Download.html

Would WikiProject National Register of Historic Places have some resources we could use? They list an "NRIS reference" format but that recommendation is based on a broken link to nr.nps.gov WikiProject_National_Register_of_Historic_Places/Style_guide. Perhaps a template should be created which takes the property number as a parameter, so if the link target changes the template only gets changed once so that doesn't break large batches of articles on US 66 or NRHP in general? I've raised the question here and from the responses it looks like NRHP Focus might do the trick (even though it's currently all-but-unused, it is a valid link to the hideously-slow search by refnum on NPS). 66.102.83.61 (talk) 02:47, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

National Register of Historic Places sites
I've imported the National Park Service itinerary for US 66 WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/US66 itinerary, a list of more than a hundred notable historic sites in eight US states. Each has a full-page description on NPS, but in many cases we have nothing but a red link. One can also see at a glance that our US 66 coverage is good in Illinois (where we're only missing one of the itinerary sites) and not so good in other states (we're missing all but five of the Oklahoma landmarks, for instance).

Perhaps this information could be used to assemble listings like U.S. Route 66 in Illinois which provide an overview of what's actually on this road? I've tried creating U.S. Route 66 in Oklahoma using the NPS itinerary as source and the Illinois article as a model; basically extract a line or two of description from each itinerary stop and restructure this in what passes for coherent prose instead of a list.

It's nowhere near comprehensive (unlike the "master list of everything" posts it selects a hundred sites, limited to NRHP, instead of the five hundred or more on a comprehensive list). The NPS itinerary both confers a bit of notability (as all are NRHP sites) and provides one good source for info. The NPS is, however, missing anything that hasn't been historically designated... such as the Munger-Moss Motel and Boots Motel. 66.102.83.61 (talk) 13:46, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Since talk pages are to be used for discussions only and since IPs can't create project pages, I moved that page to the correct namespace and corrected the link above. While there is value to NRHP listings, I think there should be other sources for what was along US 66.  NRHP tends to include things that are simply old and not necessarily historic.  I'm not trying to discount your work, I just think we need to look outside of NRHP. –Fredddie™ 17:16, 30 May 2012 (UTC)


 * I was originally looking just for a quick list of what key landmarks have no article at all. If I were to take both the forum "list of everything" and the itinerary use it to extract a list of what we're missing that'd give something like this: WikiProject_U.S._Roads/U.S._Route_66/Requested_articles... quite the sea of red links. Certainly this would need to be pared down by determining what of this mess is notable (assuming the intent is just to create a list of requested but missing articles.)
 * For something like a "structures" section in a state-level article on the route itself, these do need to be very short lists. A few paragraphs listing the best-known landmarks is enough (there will be a few that aren't on NRHP but are worth including, but certainly not the whole list of five hundred landmarks in eight states). For this, the NPS itinerary is a good starting point but sometimes a key site or two needs to be added that isn't on the historic register (St. Louis Arch is on the register but not the itinerary - another point to watch if using small 100-site lists) 66.102.83.61 (talk) 04:56, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Structure for state-detail articles
Pretty much every state along the US 66 corridor now has a signed historical route in some form or another. Do we want to write our route descriptions and junction lists in the context of these signed routes or do we want to write them as they were before the Interstate Highway System?

I think the state-detail articles should be reformatted such that the signed historical route is spoken about in the present tense. The benefit to doing that is that readers can follow a path that actually exists. Ideally, we could also fold in the Structures sections that have started to appear into some route descriptions. What do you think? –Fredddie™ 23:31, 7 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Key questions include whether the signed historical route is drivable end-to-end and whether it covers the entire US 66 in a state or just a portion. 66 is a mess of alignments and re-alignments (the early removal of Santa Fe, New Mexico or Oatman, Arizona being obvious examples) so often we do seem to be seeing "last surface alignment before freeway construction" in state-level pages and mileage counts. If the signed route is complete, use it but do specify at the junction table which alignment you're using.


 * I'd been following U.S. Route 66 in Illinois as a model as (at 'B'-grade) it seems to be the best of this rather mixed lot despite a missing junction list (the worst are Arizona and Texas as simple redirects to other highways). There is a fair amount of info in the Illinois page as to what landmarks are actually on the road, not just a description of endless miles of asphalt. Merging the landmark info into the route segment descriptions would require data currently grouped by waypoint type (fuel, diner, motel, museum...) instead be arranged by location only; it might make sense if there's a rather small amount of "structures" data to be combined (as in Kansas) but the "route" section on many of these pages is already quite large. 66.102.83.61 (talk) 19:07, 10 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Yes, we should be crystal clear with our readers on what we're using for junction lists.
 * Now, we have to decide if grouping by waypoint type is the best way to list the places or if by location is best. I'm inclined to think that since we already have (or should have) a route description that starts in one direction and ends in the other, it's a cinch to add in the places there.  I think it would be distracting to our readers to go mention a city more than once depending on how much historical stuff was there. –Fredddie™ 22:26, 10 June 2012 (UTC)


 * The wiki route descriptions run southwest to northeast for all individual US road articles. This is consistent within Wikipedia but backwards to most external sources (which print US 66 itineraries as Chicago &rarr; Santa Monica). Taking a list like this or this therefore requires flipping the waypoints into reverse order (to start from California and go north/east) before everything falls into place. Santa Monica Pier needs to be near the starting point and Sears Tower very close to the end.
 * The bridges could likely be moved out of "structures" and into the route description; they are part of the road itself. Whether moving the entire "structures" block into the route description makes sense depends on the page - Illinois is too lengthy, but on a three-hour straight-line road across the Texas panhandle, including the structures with the route description fit quite well. It doesn't really matter how the info is formatted, but there should be at least a mention of what's on this road.
 * Current status (end-June 2012) for the state-level articles is that all eight now exist, but half are missing junction lists. CA and NM are the most badly incomplete at the moment (missing both junction tables and landmarks), I'd suspect most of this series need maps and all need .kml files. It may also be worthwhile to sort our existing individual-landmark articles by US state and get each local article a one-line mention or at least a wikilink from the state-level page. The categorisation is currently "structures on 66", "bridges", "towns", "ghost towns" and "visitor attractions" so we don't have category:U.S. Route 66 in Arizona and the like on en:, even though the eight US66-state categories *do* exist on commons: for images. 66.102.83.61 (talk) 19:36, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

AfD on Berwyn Route 66 Museum
An AfD has been opened on WP:Articles for deletion/Berwyn Route 66 Museum. – S. Rich (talk) 23:05, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

Year to use for describing the route in articles
Elsewhere, Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] said "Generally, articles on decommissioned roads write the route description and junction list from the last revision before decommissioning. For US-66, this would be 1985. However, at that point, US-66 had been moved onto the Interstates for much of its length, and a good deal of it had already been removed from the system. I'd like to propose that the US-66 TF offer guidance stating that US-66 articles generally be written (in r/ds, junction lists, maps, etc.) to describe the highway as it existed in 1956, before the Interstate System was created. Thoughts?"

I agree with the principle of picking a date for which US 66 was in its prime instead of on its deathbed. However, we might also consider our sources. Are we able to put together a bunch of sources with which to support the route of US 66 in a particular year like 1956?  V C  00:24, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Oklahoma and Missouri, at least, both have a full map archive, which would include period maps suitable for creating at least a route description. —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 00:28, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
 * What happens to Santa Fe, New Mexico and Oatman, Arizona? Are they on the route or off? There's also the problem of what to do with places like Arlington, Missouri where the bridge for the old road is simply gone. (Only way to get there is I-44 to John's Modern Cabins then backtrack.) Multiple alignments usually don't have a major impact on distance charts but maps (such as the "Here it is!" series) usually show each of the multiple options (which is a mess through St. Louis, Missouri).
 * I think most of the distance charts currently in the state-level articles are based on taking the modern route, but abandoning the Interstate in favour of the last non-freeway alignment if it still exists. That produces a list of waypoints which, while not historically exact, are at least a drivable path today. There seems to be some flexibility in which alignment is on the distance chart, so long as you show your work and indicate which path you're using to get the junction distances. Only where there's a huge difference (such as the distance removed by the cutoff bypassing Santa Fe) should both lengths be indicated. K7L (talk) 00:56, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I am generally all for rewriting the articles for their greatest extent, but is 1956 the best case in each state? –Fredddie™ 01:17, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
 * The point of the Route description scheme we are proposing would not be to direct readers on how to drive disjoint segments of the old road in 2013. Rather, it would be to describe the route as it existed in 1956 or whatever year(s) we end up deciding to use, with some reference to 2013 ("US 66 followed X Street and crossed Y River on a bridge that no longer exists."). We would figure out a scheme on which route to use when the route splits (go with the Bypass or the City route?) and cover the other route in another section as we do with business routes in standard articles. I recognize figuring out the distances will be a major pain, but we can figure that out later.  V C  01:41, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
 * 1956 works for Texas. Thankfully, the official 1956 map has been posted here, so mileages and other stuff are available. - Awardgive. Help out with Project Fillmore County 02:53, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Given that Wikipedia is explicitly not a travel guide, I wouldn't worry about readers being able to drive a routing based on our route descriptions. The point should be to give a more generalized overview of where the highway did run at some point in time. The history section will be able to provide more specifics as to alignment changes both before and after the chosen reference point. I'm good with applying a specific exception to US 66 to use 1956 as that reference point instead of the year of decommissioning that's used for other former highways.  Imzadi 1979  →   06:32, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I offered my comment about attuning the year to the sources because I am in the process of writing an article on US 213: User:Viridiscalculus/U.S. Route 213. US 213 was replaced by US 50 over most of its length in 1949. The U.S. Highway was then removed and replaced by Maryland Route 213 in 1971. If I created a route description based on 1970, it would encompass only part of the historical route and it would be close to a rehash of MD 213. Based on that, I was going to use 1948 as the reference year. However, I decided to do 1944 because I had complete USGS map coverage of US 213 from the maps released during World War II (a period when virtually all road construction was on roads supporting the war effort). The USGS maps are typically better than state maps at showing the minor gradations of exactly where a highway went.  V C  13:14, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Discussion regarding historic segments of Route 66
I've started a discussion regarding the historic segments of Route 66 at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places which may interest members of this task force. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 22:51, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

Image Check on the main US 66 Article
So, I did a quick check of all the images currently in use on the main article...


 * File:Rte66RightOfWayMarker.jpg
 * File:Rte66btwnOatmanAndKingman.JPG
 * File:Whiting bros.jpg
 * File:SoulsbyServiceStation MtOliveIL.jpg
 * File:Route66 sign.jpg

All of these are accredited to byways.org, all are dead links, and we've had questions about if all the images on said website are really PD... --  Admr Boltz  14:07, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
 * http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/byways/ is the new location of the old http://www.byways.org/ so the program and site isn't dead, just relocated.  Imzadi 1979  →   05:30, 24 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Be that as it may, none of the above photos are on the new revamped Byways page. --  Admr Boltz  13:26, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Where Route 66 crosses Route 66
I don't have any references on the matter, but it should be noted soon that the city of Albuquerque is tearing up the 4th street mall and rebuilding the street. This would make the pre-1937 alignment (4th St.) cross over the post-1937 Alignment (Central Ave.) ®amos likes messages! 22:15, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Discussion at Content assessment
You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Content assessment, which is within the scope of this WikiProject. &#x0020;This WikiProject received this message because it currently uses "Current" and/or "Future" class(es). There is a proposal to split these two article "classes" into a new parameter "time", in order to standardise article-rating across Wikipedia (per RfC), while also allowing simultaneous usage of quality criteria and time for interest projects. Thanks! &#8212;CX Zoom[he/him] (let's talk • {C•X}) 07:13, 2 July 2023 (UTC)