Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Melbourne/Railway stations

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[edit] Direction

Good to see that we have example articles now, like Dennis and Ormond. They are very interesting choices!

I do think this has a lot of potential. My main worry is what will happen to this section of WikiProject Melbourne now Ambivalenthysteria is gone.

After filling in various suburb adjacency tables, I decided to draw Epping Line in OpenOffice. I hope to do the same for Lilydale and Hurstbridge (on the Open Task list) pretty soon.

So what's the direction?

EuropracBHIT 08:21, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I'm back. Heh. I only did Dennis and Ormond because they're the only two where I'm familiar enough with the station and area to write a half-decent article.
That diagram isn't a bad start, but it could do with a bit of improvement. Have you seen Hypernovean's diagram for the Alamein line? [1] Its just a bit clearer. One other thing you may want to do is decrease the width of the lines and text size used - and to use the same text size for each station, rather than varying it. Ambivalenthysteria 07:40, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Just because I can see, doesn't mean I can remember (for very long). Thank you for the link to the diagram, which I will download to my own computer in due course.
I will redraw Epping Line with this in mind, and I did a clean version of Lilydale line, with the changes you requested.
By the way, the text is in Arial Black 10.5 point (it looked clear, and certainly more so than Times New Roman 24 and whatever other sizes may have come), and the lines are 0.0cm (but visible). The variations earlier on the Epping Line diagram were due to...very 'weird' things happening, and 'getting around' the whole text and free-form line concept as OpenOffice applies it.
It's good to see you back, and I noticed the writings on other stations! EuropracBHIT 07:50, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)
That's much better. Thanks for doing this - these diagrams are really useful. A couple more things though - the station names (a couple of times, anyway) are a bit obscured by the lines and station dots. Would it be possible to fix that? Also, I think the Lilydale/Belgrave diagrams should include all the stations back to Flinders St, as they are also part of the line. Alamein, Flemington Racecourse and perhaps Williamstown, IMHO, are the only ones we should be limiting to just the unique section. Would it be possible, too, to make the image smaller? (as with the Alamein one)
Are the distances between the stations there (and their placement) relative to how they are in reality? Ambivalenthysteria 09:51, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Regarding showing stations on Lilydale etc. back to the Loop; the reason I listed Lilydale as only the branch, or Glen Waverley, Epping, Broadmeadows, Pakenham etc. goes down to the number of stations. From FSS, Belgrave has more stations than Lilydale, so I took Belgrave as being the "primrary" line, and Lilydale, GW, and Alamein as being "secondary". This was really only because of my zealous need to avoid restating things were not neccessary. What I would suggest is a note along the lines of "All stations on the Belgrave line until Ringwood, then:" or somesuch. Although I suppose the whole lists could go on the individual line pages; I would still say the primrary/secondary/non-repetitious system should stay at List of Melbourne railway stations. TPK 06:18, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I think it worked at the main list because the others were on the same page, so it was silly to repeat it. But with lines like Lilydale-Belgrave-Glen Waverley, there's really no "primary" line. I just think that with the way it looks at the moment, it would appear to someone not from Melbourne that to get to Lilydale, you'd have to get off and change at Ringwood. Ambivalenthysteria 08:50, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Station diagrams

I was thinking about creating small station/platform diagrams for each stations which would show the platforms and numbers, tracks, destinations ("To City", "To Alamein", etc). The platforms and tracks would always be facing up, with a north point showing the true direction. I could create a quick little Visual Basic program to generate them from some basic info. But I wanted to find out if anyone thinks these are worthwhile before spending any time on them. I'm working on a mockup for now though. TPK 06:18, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I think they could be a useful addition. Keep in mind though, that as we get articles, we'll also have photos to match (as I've now done with the Alamein line). Even with photos though, I still think they'd be useful. Ambivalenthysteria 07:09, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)
[2] I've made a mockup of what I was thinking, using Camberwell station. The final ones would probably be smaller, though. I was also wondering if adding details such as level crossings adjacent to stations, points/turnbacks, sidings, etc. would be worthwhile. Problem being of course it could get to complicated. TPK 07:16, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)
That looks great. Perhaps it could be inverted though? It looks a little strange to me having the citybound lines going up and the outbound lines going down. I think all those additions could be useful, as long as they're not too difficult for you to do, and don't make the diagrams look cluttered. Ambivalenthysteria 08:46, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I guess it could be inverted, I really think it feels the same both ways; I'll experiment a little with fitting more info in, and see what I can come up with. TPK 11:18, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I made this a while ago, but resurrecting it, I finally got the text horizontally aligned properly. Problem is there is no north point, and it shows nothing but the platforms and destinations, but that might well be enough. (The vertical alingment of the text may screw up, I've been grappling with this spacing problem to no avail).

To City
  1   2     3  
To To
Belgrave, Alamein
Lilydale

TPK 20:55, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC) Talk

Look superb. It'd be good if the spacing problems could be fixed, however. Ambi 01:50, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)
What are the spacing problems discussed here? Can they be fixed if colspan attributes are used? The following table illustrates the colspan attribute.
top
left right
--  B.d.mills  (Talk) 12:47, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I've been playing around with the HTML for the station diagram shown above. I have simplified the HTML quite a bit and I think there should be fewer spacing issues. Here's my version of the station diagram. It's not in wiki code, so a few standard formatting features such as transparency won't show up.
Notes:
  • Used nonbreaking spaces to make the widths of the narrow cells more regular
  • Converted to a single table
  • Used an embedded table with width set to 100% for the destination text at the bottom
To City
      1   2               3  
To
Belgrave,
Lilydale		 To
Alamein
--  B.d.mills  (Talk) 21:51, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] More ideas to bloat station articles with

I've toyed with the idea of having an 'amenities panel' for each station, something like this:

Camberwell Type Parking spaces Bicycle spaces Public telephone Public toilets
Premium X Y Yes Z

or a slightly slimmer:

Camberwell    Type: Premium  |  Parking spaces: X  |  Bicycle spaces: Y  |  Public telephone: Yes  |  Public toilets: Z

or:

Camberwell    Type: Premium    Parking spaces: X    Bicycle spaces: Y    Public telephone: Yes    Public toilets: Z

T.P.K. 09:20, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It's not bad, but I think it's not awfully encyclopedic. In the articles that I've written at least, only the station status and sometimes the parking got a mention - but a cursory one at most. Ambi 09:34, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Fair enough. T.P.K. 09:36, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I can see that it's non encyclopedic. But in reality, my local train station wouldn't make it into an encyclopedia anyway - and that information is a distinguishing feature of stations. On a related note, to make introductary paragraphs easy and consistent I've made some templates - check out Elsternwick railway station, Melbourne, Ripponlea railway station, Melbourne and Gardenvale railway station, Melbourne, examples of Premium, Host and Other stations generated from different templates depending on station type. Feedback appreciated. Josh Parris ✉ 22:08, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

I really like the introductory paragraphs - they're a nice start, and turn those substubs into something reasonably useful. However, I still strongly oppose using those non-encyclopedic templates, though. I can go read an article on a station in London or Chicago and be reasonably interested by the details about it - but I'm really not going to care how many public toilets or bicycle spaces it has. That's just a case of trying to pad out the article at the expense of it actually being of interest to anyone much. Ambi 02:07, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
Both the introductory text and the pastel coloured box are generated by the same template - the box could be commented out, and later exposed, or if we so desire left visible and later commented out, but due to a bug/misfeature in wikimedia, at the moment changing a template doesn't change the articles that include it - the article is only changed the next time it's edited. So I wanted to generate some consensus because a change will require touching articles.
If you look at the articles' source, you can see that the introductory paragraph can be extended out - just by placing text after the template call. Or it can be left as is. Josh Parris ✉ 00:26, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
What's the point of having the paragraph inside a template? It's a good intro, but it really wouldn't hurt to have it as a normal paragraph. Templates are good for many things; paragraphs of text are not among them. Ambi 08:23, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
They give consistent formatting to boilerplate text, the ability to chuck in things like a photograph based on the article name, and those infoboxes that it seems I love and you hate. Josh Parris ✉ 08:26, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Up and Down

There is a technical term for the travel direction in relation to Melbourne. Trains heading towards Melbourne are Up trains, and trains heading away from Melbourne are Down trains. We should include this in our direction labelling. We can arrange it so that towards Melbourne is always on top (up), and away from Melbourne is always on the bottom (Down). This will also help with station adjacency. At present, station adjacency has left and right used for the previous and next stations, but the proposed station diagram would employ up and down instead. If we always use up for "towards Melbourne" and down for "away from Melbourne", not only would our proposed station diagrams be consistent with the adjacency diagrams, but the orientation of the diagrams would match the actual directions used for these directions in the technical terminology (up and down). --  B.d.mills  (Talk) 12:59, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

No objections here - this would seem to make a lot of sense. Ambi 13:17, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] {{MelbourneStations}} and {{MelbStation}}

I think having both of these templates tends to make each page look quite cluttered. How feasable is it to combine these two templates into a single template? Does anyone else agree?
Two stripe 10:56, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

I agree that it looks cluttered, although it isn't as bad on larger articles. However, I'd rather kill the quick facts box altogether, as it doesn't serve much purpose. Ambi 13:36, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
It looks like one has been deleted. Josh Parris # 21:45, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
No such luck. Ambi 00:06, 25 October 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Progress update Feb 3, 2006

I have checked all articles in the List of Melbourne railway stations and made an estimate of percentage complete for each one. I have rated each article between 0.20 for a basic stub to 1.00 for a virtually complete article. Examples of complete articles would include Flinders Street, Richmond, Windsor, Essendon, Blackburn, Alamein, Rushall and Keon Park.

The calculated overall progress for Melbourne railway stations, as at Feb 3, 2006, is 35%.


Here is a list of ratings and number of articles:


Rating No. of articles
0.00 0
0.20 (stub) 119
0.25 - 0.40 67
0.45 - 0.65 17
0.70 - 0.95 12
1.00 18
Total 233


Based on the above numbers a table of stations based on Railway Lines looks like this:

Position Railway Line No. of stations %Complete
1  City Loop 5 1.00
2  Alamein line 6 1.00
3  Lilydale line 22 0.48
4  Sandringham line 11 0.45
5  Upfield line 14 0.41
6  Frankston line 26 0.37
7  Broadmeadows line 12 0.37
8  Flemington Racecourse line 2 0.33
9  Craigieburn line 1 0.30
10  Epping line 20 0.29
11  Sydenham line 9 0.29
12  Williamstown line 3 0.28
13  Glen Waverley line 12 0.28
14  Hurstbridge line 17 0.26
15  Belgrave line 8 0.26
16  Pakenham line 18 0.26
17  Sunbury line 2 0.25
18  Tourist railways 17 0.25
19  Werribee line 13 0.23
20  Stony Point line 9 0.22
21  Cranbourne line 2 0.20
22  Melton line 4 0.20


Eric. Cuddy Wifter 02:40, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Metlink Signage Status

In the list of things to include, it mentions signage status.

I maintain a map of the signage status, which might be useful for this. It's available here: http://www.evancottle.net/metlinks.gif, and is based on reports from: http://www.railpage.com.au/f-t15033-0-asc-s0.htm

Hope that helps :) --Evan C 11:59, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Progress update April 22, 2006

The progess update for Railway Stations shows that of 233 articles, 18 are complete, 41 are over 50% complete, 89 have up to 40% content and 85 are stubs. Percentage complete is 39% (= to 92 articles). - Cuddy Wifter 05:57, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Updating of criteria needed

The context of this page is quite outdated and old. I have already fixed the infobox and station navigation tables to the current standard but I think we need to decide on a layout of the page and the basic guidelines of what to include in an article. There is some items in the criteria which mention things to include which I have seen people say "That's not something that is meant to be in an encyclopedia" so I think it needs some changes. Lakeyboy 12:02, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 'Metlinked' status and little things such as car park spaces, bicycle lockers etc

I think we need to decide what should happen with these aspects of railway stations. I reckon the 'Metlinked' status has a chance and with Evan C making a map which shows the metlinking status of the stations around Melbourne. But I'm not sure about the car park spaces and bicycle lockers and etc. I am not for and I'm not against it. I'll leave that decision up to others. Lakeyboy 09:19, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

The Metlinking status might've been approprate a few months ago. Now, the vast majority of stations are complete. As for the other details, if there's something that makes that detail special (eg; "This station received a carpark extension in 2003"), it could be included as text in the body of the article. Otherwise those kinds of details probably aren't needed, when the station info's linked to anyway. --Evan C (Talk) 09:48, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Metlink to V/line station navigation table

Stations such as Pakenham, Craigieburn and Werribee continue on as a V/Line service. Is there a navigation infobox template we can use for this? Alternatively, perhaps the Metlink infobox could appear as a terminus, with another infobox underneath it for navigation of the V/Line service. --ozzmosis 18:43, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Well, we could just do what I have done with Belgrave and have the transition like that but it then has to eventually involve a new station navigation template for the 'Entire Network' link for V/Line Lakeyboy 22:50, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, but the Belgrave navbox makes it look like the 'Belgrave (Puffing Billy)' station is Metlinked, which it obviously isn't... --ozzmosis 05:41, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
Simple solution would be to change the blues in the navbox to the purple used for V/Line services, and same for the infobox. There would be a "terminus" navbox for the suburban line, and another one joined onto it for the V/Line services.
Also, on the subject of infoboxes, I've been told that if and when "Viclinking" happens, the signs themselves will be blue, but there would not be a Metlink logo, of course (and Viclink doesn't really exist yet). As for stations like Pakenham et al, the box would depend on the present management of the station. So Pakenham would get a metro one, but Craigieburn a V/Line one (until Connex/whoever takes it over). So... blue bars and no logo on the sign background?
I'll make some examples. --Evan C (Talk) 12:01, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
Ok, I've been playing around with infoboxes and etc and have finally come up with solutions for the Metlink (Connex) - Viclink (V/Line) problem. Have a look at Pakenham and Nar Nar Goon stations and you will see new infoboxes and station navigation boxes I have added. Also notice new blue signs with 'Viclink' instead of 'Metlink' for Nar Nar Goon. The boxes might need some tweaking but I think they do the job. Lakeyboy 12:12, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
Looks good, just black out the Viclink logo. At Southern Cross, they either used Metlink or nothing at all - I think Viclink is only a "sorta maybe might happen sometime down the track" at this stage. Ie - only the website (identical in most respects to Metlink) exists. --Evan C (Talk) 12:41, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
I've changed the purple to the purple used in the journey planner icons. It provides greater contrast, and the only use of "V/Line Purple" in signage has been that one (on a bus stop sign at Ardeer station IIRC). --Evan C (Talk) 12:54, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Change of infobox

I notice the fair use nazis have been at work and deleted your infobox with the Metlink logo. I think the old box looks better - can you put back the header but without the copyrighted logo on it? (JROBBO 23:09, 26 June 2006 (UTC))


[edit] Progress update August 28, 2006

The progess update for Melbourne Railway Stations shows that of 233 articles, 18 are complete, 68 are over 50% complete, and 147 have 30 to 40% content. The percentage complete is estimated at 48%. - Cuddy Wifter 00:59, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Station Status

I presume this is meant to be Host / Premium / Unstaffed. There's a category, Category:Host Melbourne railway stations that, like Category:Premium Melbourne railway stations holds Premium stations, was meant to hold the host stations. Is anyone interested in populating this category, perhaps with a small modification to the template? Josh Parris#: 05:24, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Albury railway station and suggestions for more stations

I've done an article on Albury railway station, New South Wales akin to the Victorian format, since I haven't got around to making a NSW country station infobox yet (but since it's served by more Victorian trains than NSW, maybe it should stay that way.)

I had some suggestions: you have the Overland runnning through the Melbourne suburban network, but past that there's no listing of the stations where it stops (like Ararat, Dimboola, etc.) Can articles be made for the stops on the Overland? JROBBO 07:21, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

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