Talk:Central Railroad of New Jersey

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[edit] Citations

The text of the article has an awful lot of links, which impairs reading (at least mine). I removed repeated links within the text, but it still seems cluttered. I have a couple of ideas:

  1. I think it would be prudent to remove the dates from the article; except for the really important dates (the date of the charter and the date of merger into Conrail, for instance), I think that it is in most cases sufficient to leave just the year, rather than the month and day.
  2. Why are the "History" and "Corporate History" sections separate? Would it make a better read if they are merged?
  3. There are only two sources cited within the article. Is it better to add more websites with corroborating information? I am not an expert on the CNJ, but I have the following texts, any of which contains plenty of information on the road:
  • Encyclopedia of New Jersey by Maxine Lurie and Marc Mappen (Rutgers UP, 2004)
  • New Jersey's Multiple Municipal Madness by Alan Karcher (Rutgers UP, 1998), which includes info on the wars between the PRR and the CNJ.
  • The Images of America series books on Bayonne, Jersey City (both original and the 1940-1960 collection), Hoboken, Railroads of Hoboken and Jersey City, Henry Hudson Trail (the former CNJ Seashore Branch), and Steam to Diesel in New Jersey.
  • Four of the Pennisi Northeast Railroad Scene books, on the Lehigh & Hudson River RR, Reading Company, CNJ, and the Penn-Central.
  • For what it is worth, I am also in possession of a map titled "Central Railroad Company of New Jersey, Map of System and Connecting Lines," dated 1944. I am less clear on how to cite this map, however.

Any input would be appreciated. --Runnerupnj 14:42, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Some thoughts...
I'm less inclined to reduce the dates to just the years since I use that information in populating and maintaining the Anniversaries section of Portal:Trains, but I do see several instances in the text where a solitary year is linked (e.g. "Extensions took it west to [[Dunellen, New Jersey|Dunellen]] in [[1840]], just east of [[Bound Brook, New Jersey|Bound Brook]] in [[1841]] and the rest of the way to Somerville in [[1842]]." could have all of the individual years delinked).
I'd support merging the two history sections in a way that put all of the information in chronological order. The resulting History section could be subdivided into major "eras" of the railroad's history.
This article definitely needs more inline citations for specific, verifiable facts. I generally try to list at least one inline citation per paragraph; if existing unreferenced text can be verified by the references you've got, then by all means add the references.
If we want to move this article up through the quality chain, we will also need a few more images and a system map; we'll also need to prune the list of stations, probably to an article like List of stations on the Central Railroad of New Jersey. Slambo (Speak) 15:59, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
Responses:
I merged the two history sections, and then divvied them up into three "eras." I have begun researching and editing the copy of the article, but before I add the content I want to make sure the text is cited properly.
I have added the stations that were formerly included in the main article to the List of stations on the Central Railroad of New Jersey that you pointed to. I also used that 1944 map to add the stations from branch lines. I will continue to fill in the table, but citing it will be very time-consuming.
I don't see a high-quality image from the LoC like the one from PRR article. The map I have a physical copy of is similar to this map from the Rutgers Mapmaker archive (928kb jpg). That image carries a Rutgers watermark, however, and I am unsure of any map's copyright status. The company effectively went under 30 years ago, but I don't know what intellectual property transferred over to Conrail, how long those rights last etc. WikiProject Maps doesn't mention copyrights and Wikipedia:Copyrights doesn't mention maps. Are there any standards on this issue?
--Runnerupnj 14:02, 18 April 2007 (UTC)