Talk:Indian Railways

Near-duplicate articles

The hatnote claims "This article is about the organisation. For general information on railways in India, see Rail transport in India." But the articles are pretty much identical. -- John of Reading (talk) 13:53, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

So is all about Indian Railways have you ever gone on a train — Preceding unsigned comment added by 103.58.153.147 (talk) 08:05, 5 October 2020 (UTC)

Appropriate logo size in infobox

Hi, I want to start a discussion regarding the appropriate size of the logo in the infobox. There seem to be two common logo sizes used previously in this article, 180px and 250px. It is my opinion that the text on the train is most legible when the logo size is at 250px. However, some editors believe that 250px is either too big for the infobox or that the legibility of the text on the train is not very important. I request you all to leave your opinions here so that consensus can be gathered Prolix 💬 19:42, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

• Support 250px since at this size the text written on the train is most legible. Prolix 💬 19:44, 14 September 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose - I personally see no point enlarging the logo for the sake of Indian writing on a train which most readers here won't understand and so therefore wont make a difference to their understanding of the topic at hand, That being said I'm currently on a 1280x800 laptop (mainly because I still enjoy Windows 7!) so ofcourse what looks big to me may look normal for others. –Davey2010^Talk 20:49, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

Commons files used on this page or its Wikidata item have been nominated for deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons files used on this page or its Wikidata item have been nominated for deletion:

• BCNA wagons.jpg
• LHB SL coaches.jpg
• SRE WAG12B 60003.jpg

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 17:19, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

India Education Program course assignment

This article was the subject of an educational assignment supported by Wikipedia Ambassadors through the India Education Program.

The above message was substituted from {{IEP assignment}} by PrimeBOT (talk) on 19:57, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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This review is transcluded from Talk:Indian Railways/GA2. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 20:13, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Comments

In many ways this is a nice article, richly detailed and illustrated, cited to many good sources, well-organised, and thoroughly linked into Wikipedia's, ah, network of railway articles. It has clearly been attended to over the years by many editors who enjoy all things railway, and some who are certainly proud of the scale of India's railway system, to boot.

However, as currently constituted there are some rather serious issues with the article.

• Omitted is any substantial coverage of what we might call the non-functional requirements or qualities. The structure (companies, infrastructure) is covered in detail, as is the function (passenger, mountain, freight). But the qualities of the system and the services it provides - speed, punctuality, reliability, safety, crowding, profitability to name a few - are covered at best in a scattered and indirect way in sections on other topics, yet they are precisely what distinguish one railway company from another. To take safety as an example (we could discuss all the mentioned qualities, and others, this is just an instance), the article has an empty section with a "main" link to a list of accidents and incidents (a list which is itself problematic and poorly-cited), but no discussion at all of safety: not its history, nor its causes, nor policy, nor progress. Signalling improvements are in fact mentioned, but not their purpose. In short, the whole aspect of the article which would discuss how good an engineering company IR is, is missing. Omitted, too, is what might be called the old or dark side of the company. Consider the photographs File:India crowded train.jpg from 2007, or File:Crowded Thane station on 31 Dec 2012 02.jpg. These might illustrate a discussion of how IR was working to improve comfort and safety, and reduce overcrowding on trains and platforms.

• Present is, pace a recent AfD, a large overlap in many sections with Rail transport in India. Now we can all see that in theory, an article on railways in a country (let's call this R) would be different from an article on a country's railway company (let's call this C). The R article would describe the types of railway, the rolling stock, the routes, the track, the signalling, the history of R, and so on. The C article would describe the company's corporate structure, the company history, its management, its staff, its labour relations, mergers and acquisitions, competition, profitability, quality of service (see the item above). It would say rather little on all matters R. All of this would be easier to separate out, clearly, if the history of C was sharply distinct from the history of R - say, the railways of Ruritania had originally been run by the Moldoranian Imperial Railway Company, then by Ruritanian Iron Roads, then by Ruritanian Railways, and finally after privatisation by Ruritanian Northern, Ruritanian Western, and Ruritanian Urban. The place of Ruritanian Railways in this scheme of things would be visibly different from the "Rail transport in Ruritania", covering only a short period and concerning one of several clearly distinct ways of running the network. Coming back to Indian Railways, the article should, all the same, be written like our putative Ruritanian Railways article, explaining the company's approach, comparing it to other national rail companies, discussing its corporate style and approach, and so on. Apart from the very brief chapter "Organisation", I see very little of all this in the article. Instead, I see a whole lot of material about equipment and infrastructure.

Many reviewers would conclude from the above items that the article should immediately be quick-failed. My approach is to discuss issues with GA nominators, who are certainly knowledgeable and interested in their subject, and to consider how the article concerned can be reshaped. Often even apparently major changes can be made quite rapidly: but first, we need to agree where the article is headed. I look forward to hearing your response. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:55, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Hi, first of all, thanks for taking up the review and letting know of the first hand comments.

a. First point, agreed. The article covers the infrastructure in a comprehensive way but on the operations/functioning part, there is not much information apart from some information in the respective sections. This would need a substantial research (I might work on that) and would be an addition to the article.

b. On the second point, IR (C) and RT (R) are two different articles with C forming a subset of R with the history of R encompassing the history of C. Concerning India, while more about the company or operations can be talked about to improve C, I believe still there will be a lot of overlap as C is a state owned entity and almost all R in India is handled by C.

Thanks! Magentic Manifestations (talk) 06:24, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

On (a), the question is then should we hold this GAN open for a substantial time or close it now and let you work on it at leisure; on (b), you seem to be justifying a much larger degree of overlap than I envisage (everyone will accept that there must be some, but this article's focus cannot be largely on R matters as it is now). I think, given that we agree there is a large amount to be done and that it will take an indeterminable amount of time to do, and that we seem to disagree on the desired end point for the article under (b), we should end this GAN now. I look forward to seeing the rewritten article when it is ready. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:36, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Proposed merge of Jalpaiguri Road railway station into Indian Railways

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

The result of this discussion was no consensus to merge Magentic Manifestations (talk) 13:57, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

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Should be merged due to lack of citations of verifiable sources. TRL (talk) 00:04, 3 May 2024 (UTC)

Not sure of the rationale of this proposal. For one, individual railway station articles cannot be merged with the main article of Indian Railways. The article is similar to thousands of other articles on Indian railway stations that are existent in Wiki and not sure what is different here to warrant deletion/merging. If there are lack of citations, it needs to be addressed. Magentic Manifestations (talk) 05:41, 3 May 2024 (UTC)

Agreed. I don't think a merge makes any sense, as the content would look completely out of place in Indian Railways. The solution is to fix the sourcing (and possibly delete some of the info that cannot be sourced) in Jalpaiguri Road railway station. Pichpich (talk) 21:54, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Closing the merger discussion as there are no subsequent comments and the comments have been in favor of not merging.Magentic Manifestations (talk) 13:57, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.