Module talk:Adjacent stations/Southern Pacific Railroad

Named service versus local stops

@Cards84664: For major routes where named services ran until (or nearly until) A-Day, it's better to have those than older local routes. For a given route, the final service configuration is generally the only one we need to show. Minor stations closed well before A-Day are likely to remain redlinks indefinitely; showing them just means the templates aren't actually useful for navigation. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 18:33, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

@Pi.1415926535: I don't see navigation as the priority here. There are many former stations that weren't served by named trains, an example being Mentor station. That's why I created templates like Template:NYC stations: Poughkeepsie–Croton-Harmon, to get around the redlinks (I should rework that into a station list somehow). Adding named trains to the Empire corridor (as an example) would make the adjacent stations more accurate, but it would just bloat the infobox with redundant links. On top of that, how do we determine which named trains are more important, besides dates? Cards84664 18:52, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

Also to note, you only need to link to Glendale station once from Union Station (Los Angeles) if you're listing lines instead of limited services. And, if the new Ceres station happens to be on the location of the old Ceres SP station, how would that be handled on Southern Pacific Railroad Depot (Modesto, California)? Cards84664 19:03, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

Huh? The entire point of s-rail/adjacent stations is for navigating between station articles, and to show clearly defined services. Those are useful in an encyclopedia. Using the templates to display every service pattern or minor station that has existed over two centuries is not useful or encyclopediac, as you have been told numerous times.

When the template shows only the line name and redlinks - Mentor station being a perfect example - it doesn't provide any useful information or navigation aids. All it provides is the line name, which can be listed much more compactly under "lines". It's much more useful to have an accurate station listing (see Boston and Albany Railroad#Main line station listing for a good example), and forgo adjacent stations entirely where it's not needed. That also eliminates the need for your NYC stations templates, which present information that belongs on the article about the line - and are in violation of WP:EXISTING.

For Ceres, just add a section about the former station to the article about the future station; maybe have the adjacent stations point directly at the section. And yes, for major stations, listing all the former services is bulky, and sometimes there is a need to streamline it. (Here, there's at most four named services [Coast Daylight, Lark, San Joaquin Daylight, Sacramento Daylight] to list, and the first two can share the left side.) But converting every other station's template to a bunch of redlinks is not the way to do it. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 21:58, 3 June 2020 (UTC)