Talk:Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway

contention in article editing

An editor, SarekOfVulcan, who has engaged in a long history of contentious editing with/against me, has followed me to this article and removed mention of NRHP listing in the article. I don't welcome this.

There is however a wikipedia policy/guideline of BRD, which I am willing to follow if there is some legitimate point about this article. However, it is absurd and obtuse or worse to remove mention of the NRHP listing. If there is some other point that the editor wishes to make, please state it here. --doncram 13:07, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

As near as I can determine, your assertion that part of the railway survives was a bit of WP:Original research based on an inference from the fact that something was listed on the National Register in 1976 (36 years ago) and the listing apparently has not been removed. That's not something that belongs in Wikipedia, and it certainly does not excuse edit warring or personal attacks. --Orlady (talk) 15:49, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

I have found only one source that seems to support the current existence of 'something'. "Although Mt. Pisgah still stands proudly over the town of Jim Thorpe, only remnants of the historic Switchback’s inclined plane and summit operations exist today." http://www.switchbackgravityrr.org/ This doesn't mean that the source intended to be an exhaustive reference for what track or other materials still exist, but it does cast some doubt on the other assertion made by doncram's addition. -- Avanu (talk) 15:57, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict)The actual NPS nomination-document dated 1976 states that "Although the ties, rails, and cars have long since been sold for scrap, much of the right-of-way still remains intact"(Page 2), so at that time *no track still existed and *no ties still existed. As of 1976, what was intact of the actual railroad were the surface/topographical/right-of-way features of the Mt. Pisgah plane along with (ruined) remnants of the plane house, the concrete water reservoir, and some concrete trestle footings (and these remnants are what seem to be referenced in the contended edits). In the 1976 nomination the remaining portion of the railroad including the Mt. Jefferson plane area was "not included in the nomination" because it had been "substantially altered"(Page 3).

Unfortunately, the link I found in my Google search is a direct link to the pdf file, instead of an URL the pdf file's title is: Switchback_Gravity_RR_MauchChunk-1pdf , what is available at the Google search page is "www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/http;//...MauchChunk..." (so it is from the official State of Pennsylvania portal) titled "NATIONAL REGISTER OF msromc PLACES", I found this document doing a search for "Mauch Chunk Railway National Register of historic places". This next bit of off-topic but I really did I try to do a direct search of the NPS/NHRP database but gave up, apparently I think I have to download the entire database? or something?....anyway, not intuitive at all. Shearonink (talk) 16:55, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Apologies to future readers, or anyone actually interested in the history here.

I have no idea what issue SarekOfVulcan had -- he has not deigned to explain himself -- I think he projected something that is not true, but I really have no idea. It seems like rude behavior, to not deign to discuss, and to open an ANI incident instead. Like in previous contentions that he started up, I literally do not understand what he might possibly mean.

I have no idea what Orlady is referring to, but I experience her entry here and what she says above as generally hostile.

The part of the article that I referred to was the statement you added to the lead section: "A 47-acre (19 ha) section survives and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places." The only identifiable source for that information is the NRIS database entry. It's a far stretch from a database entry to that statement. Additionally (but not as clear a case of original research), particularly since I'm not familiar with railroad sections being measured in acres (the acre is a unit of area, but railroads normally are measured using units of length), the statement about the Register listing ("In 1976, a 47-acre (19 ha) section, from Ludlow St. in Summit Hill to F.A.P. 209 in Jim Thorpe was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as "Mauch Chunk and Summit Hill Switchback Railroad". The listed area included four contributing sites") seems like an excessive amount of creative embroidery upon the bare facts in the database. IMO, about the most text that can be justified on the basis of the database entry is "The railway was recognized by a National Register of Historic Places listing in 1976." --Orlady (talk) 16:59, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

I have no intention, and never did, to make up anything, and I don't know what Avanu is seeing either.

The article skipped from 1932 to "now". I fixed up the NRHP infobox (a change which no one has yet attacked), and inserted mention, in proper sequence, of the NRHP listing.

What i put into the article was "In 1976, a 47-acre (19 ha) section, from Ludlow St. in Summit Hill to F.A.P. 209 in Jim Thorpe was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as "Mauch Chunk and Summit Hill Switchback Railroad". The listed area included four contributing sites". And I added a footnote sourcing that, and I inserted mention of the NRHP listing in the lede of the article. In the lede phrase I used the word "survive", which seems to be the focus of all the projections. Something, obviously, survived to 1976. I meant not to specify anything not known, and I certainly did not state or mean to imply that the railway still was in service or anything else.

Could someone please restore the sensible mention of NRHP listing in time sequence in the article, and put something appropriate in the lede. Thanks. --doncram 16:20, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

That's not a "section", as I've explained before in edit summaries and the AN/I discussion, that's THE WHOLE THING. And you don't know what survived, because you haven't bothered looking, unlike the rest of us. Your statement was that the Railway survived, and that is Flat. Out. Wrong. Not to mention contradicted by the sentence immediately before the one you added.--SarekOfVulcan (talk) 16:36, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, I guess, for commenting and saying something. What you say is loaded with a lot of extra, like is it your intention to prove that I was outrageously wrong in some obvious way, to justify your own behavior? I think that would be rude, too, so hope you don't go on with that.

I also don't understand which previous sentence you are referring to. There's no obvious contradiction that I see, between the two sentences that I added vs. the two corresponding previous sentences. For you to see a contradiction, you must be projecting something that I did not intend or mean. We've been here before, Sarek: you seem to think something is obvious so you don't have to explain it, and I literally don't know what you are talking about.

Anyhow, do you have a specific suggestion what can be put into the article, at the two places? If you are suggesting the article should have said "The whole thing was listed on the NRHP", like you seem to be, that would be wrong, because you don't know that. (I didn't see above, that editor Shearonink has already identified that it was not the entire thing. Thanks Shearonink.) You apparently don't like what I put in, but I was trying to avoid making any incorrect or unsupported assertions. What do you suggest instead?

The lede sentence I had put in was " A 47-acre (19 ha) section survives and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places." That doesn't say that the railway as a functioning system still in operation, nor does it say there are tracks or anything else. It says "Section" without saying what it is part of, and it doesn't exclude the possibility that the section could be the whole thing, or nearly the whole thing. If you can do better, please do suggest something else. --doncram 17:10, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

I just read the nomination document on the PA state site, and withdraw my contention that the nomination included the entire railway -- parts were omitted because they had been "substantially altered", as Shearonink was so good as to point out above. I was confused because of the figure-8 layout of the track.--SarekOfVulcan (talk) 17:43, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Since this is what is sourced from the Historic Places Nomination form (and please if someone could find a direct/verifiable link, that would be truly peachy-keen) the lede and the section further down could be adjusted to something like "A 47-acre (19 ha) surviving section of the railroad's former right-of-way is listed on the National Register of Historic Places." or something similar. The issue is that one particular section of the Railroad's physical right-of-way is what has survived intact (without physical incursions either man-made like road construction or natural like flooding), not what most observers would think of as a railroad "line" (tracks, ties, trail hardware, structures). Shearonink (talk) 18:04, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

I don't really like the coordinates given in the article -- they show up as the middle of the woods, and not on the trail as drawn by Google Maps. Can anyone confirm these, or give alternate coordinates for something recognizable, like the top of the Pisgah Plane? --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 14:19, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

I changed the coordinates to the location of the top of the Mt. Pisgah plane, as clearly visible in an orthorectified and georeferenced 1938 AAA aerial photo. — Jim Irwin (talk) 14:45, 5 January 2013 (UTC)