Talk:First Transcontinental Railroad

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

First Transcontinental Railroad → First United States transcontinental railroad — The present title is misleading and untrue. This is not the first transcontinental railroad. It is the first US or North American transcontinental railroad, and the title should reflect that —fishhead64 (talk) 03:39, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Notification left at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Trains. Slambo (Speak) 11:25, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Survey

Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with *'''Support''' or *'''Oppose''', then sign your comment with ~~~~. Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's naming conventions.

• oppose See my reasoning below (Centpacrr (talk) 05:44, 5 June 2008 (UTC))

• oppose for the same reasons as described by User:Centpacrr below. Slambo (Speak) 11:21, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

• oppose for reasons below. The name offers no value added and doesn't address an inaccuracy of any such name claim Americasroof (talk) 14:36, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Discussion

Oppose: While the CPRR/UPRR was originally referred to as the "Pacific Railroad" when being built and after it opened in 1869, it also became known as the First Transcontinental Railroad when the Northern Pacific, Southern Pacific, Atlantic & Pacific, DRGW, and other routes were opened in subsequent years. The term "First Transcontinental Railroad" is, in fact, more of an accepted and well recognized "proper" name then it is a description. For that reason alone the article should retain that name. In addition the Canadian Pacific (1881), Trans Siberian (1919), Trans-Australian (1917), and the other "transcontinental" roads were also all completed well after 1869. Some claim that the Panama Railroad (1855) is the "Frist Transcontinental Railroad" because it connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, but this is also incorrect. The Panama Railroad only crossed an isthmus (a narrow strip of land, bordered on both sides by water, connecting two larger bodies of land), not a continent (one of the seven main landmasses of the globe -- Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Australia, and Antarctica). That is not the same thing at all. (Centpacrr (talk) 05:44, 5 June 2008 (UTC))

• Comment Of course the Panama Railroad was and is a transcontinental railroad. Its completion was widly haied as an an astonishing and historic achievement at the time. I see nothing in the definition of continent that says it is a continent only at its wide points, never at its more narrow points. And if one wishes to argue semantics, the Panama Railroad actually went all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific as a single railline, which arguably could make it much more of an actual trancontinental railroad than this one. That said, I have no objection to the article being at "First Transcontinental Railroad" if that is what it was commonly called (so long as the those who bother to read the details of the article can understand the name may not be a technically accurate description). -- Infrogmation (talk) 13:44, 5 June 2008 (UTC)
• Comment about what was really first railroad across U.S. - I dislike the current name of "First Transcontinental Railroad" but dislike the proposed "First United States transcontinental railroad" even more. I put the disambig on the top of the page a while back to sort this out. First Transcontinental Railroad is widely used to describe the Omaha to Sacramento project (neither of which is on a coast) and so the proposed name change doesn't seem to offer any value added. And in the for what it's worth department the Omaha to Sacramento railroad was never connected by land to the nation's eastern railroads at Omaha until 1872 when a bridge was finally built across the Missouri River to Council Bluffs, Iowa (which was supposed to be the official eastern starting point of the railroad project). The first true continental railroad was in 1870 via Kansas Pacific and Denver Pacific connecting to the Union Pacific after the Missouri River was bridged at Kansas City. Until we can come up with a better name to describe the situation, I don't see any reason to change it. Americasroof (talk) 14:36, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Note about precedents - A while back the Pony Express article ran into a similar discussions since there were other instances where horses were used for fast delivery of the mail. This was addressed by saying the article was specifically about a business operation between St. Joseph and Sacramento. The First Continental Railroad clearly says it is about a business operation between Omaha and Sacramento. Americasroof (talk) 14:43, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Panama Railroad as Transcontinental Railroad: The Panama Railroad as used in "transcontinental" travel between New York and San Francisco before 1869 was actually only a very small portion (between Aspinwall and Panama City) of the entire ticketed passage which was offered by the North American Steamship Company prior to the completion of the Pacific Railroad with the vast majority of the trip being made over water by steamer. I see that the contention that the Panama Railroad is a "transcontinental" railroad is derived from an entry to that effect originally made by Infrogmation on February 2, 2004, in the article Transcontinental Railroad and on December 27, 2004, by RJII (since permanently banned from editing for abuse), but neither of these contentions (or the current portion of the article still claiming that the Panama Railroad is a "transcontinental railroad") cite any references to support it. When opened on January 28, 1855, the railroad was actually referred to as the "Inter-Oceanic" railroad. Using this logic, a railroad running from Miami, FL, on the Atlantic Ocean to Tampa, FL, on the Gulf of Mexico could also be described as a "transcontinental railroad" as well which would, I think, be misleading. (Centpacrr (talk) 19:36, 5 June 2008 (UTC))

Reply No, the analogy between Florida and Panama doesn't work. Panama is at the bottom of the continent. There is nowhere else to go - if you take Panama out, the continent is shorter. If you take Florida out, it isn't. In any event, the real issue, imo, is that the title is confusing. If this is about the FIRST transcontinental railroad, why not merge it with transcontinental railroad? Because it isn't, really, it is about the first transcontinental rail crossing of the United States. By renaming the article in line with this reality, we completely avoid the diverting argument about whether Panama is part of a continent or not - which, whether you like it or not, is not clear-cut. Given these points, what, exactly, is your objection? fishhead64 (talk) 00:24, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

• "First Transcontinental Railroad" is the common name for this work of engineering, as is used, for example in one of the references in the article [Bain, David Howard (1999). Empire Express; Building the first Transcontinental Railroad. Viking Penguin. ISBN 0-670-80889-X. ]. I'm sure we can find other references dating back quite some time that also call it that. It also seems much less likely to me that the Panama Railroad's common name would be First Transcontinental Railroad. The key here is that this article's title is a proper noun and not a descriptive noun. Slambo (Speak) 11:43, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

I agree fully with Slambo as this is exactly my point: the term "First Transcontinental Railroad" is the commonly accepted name for this work of engineering and has been for more than a century. In addition to David's book you can also see my own 2005 book, Riding the Transcontinental Rails: Overland Travel on the Pacific Railroad 1865-1881, and the late Steve Ambrose's tome Nothing Like It in the World. (Centpacrr (talk) 12:57, 6 June 2008 (UTC))

I plead guilty to starting the article on the Panama Railway, as I saw it as an important subject no one else had gotten around to previously. However I cannot claim credit for being the first to notice that it was "transcontinental". My mid-20th century Encyclopedia Americana uses the term in reference to it, and I strongly doubt they were the first. -- Infrogmation (talk) 20:15, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.