Talk:Stratford-upon-Avon and Midland Junction Railway

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Trains Portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Trains, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to rail transport on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
	See also: WikiProject Trains to do list
B	This article has been rated as B-Class on the quality scale. (assessment comments)
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale within the Trains WikiProject.
	This article is maintained by WikiProject UK Railways.
	This article needs a map. Please work with the Maps task force to create and add a map to this article. Once the requested map is added, remove the Mapneeded parameter from the {{TrainsWikiProject}} template call on this page to remove this map request.

I thought I should put here a word of explanation as to why I did such a hutchet job on the original article. To put it simply I found it to be too dismissive of the line altogether. Here are some observations to back that up (I'm not quoting directly):

• the article stated that the SMJR was one of the smallest of the lines going into the 1923 Grouping, I felt that this was much too sweeping a statement: there were well over 120 smaller lines, and my copy of the 1912 Railway Year Book lists them and shows their statistics. SMJR is given its own article including map, whereas the others were simply in a table appendix
• it was not a maze of branch lines: there were only two connecting links to other company's lines
• the tenor of much of the article was that, if a railway doesn't carry passengers and like this one goes through empty countryside, then it is in some way a failure. Until relatively recently, with the advent of competing road transport, the line occupied a premier position, offering as it did a cross-country link for FREIGHT: its initial reason
• in 1911, the company's books showed £43,000 income; £27,000 expenditure; and it paid a dividend
• I don't believe that it was kept going by 'local business men' - once the iron-ore traffic was gone, it was of little use to the local economy
• the dates given were all guesswork: no definite date was ever quoted
• ( a minor point)I did not care much for the fact that the huge Kineton MoD depot was called an 'arms dump'!!!!! And the link is almost five miles in length: definitely not a 'short spur' ...

Peter Shearan 20:58, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)