# Talk:Susquehanna River Bridge (Northeast Corridor)

@Pi.1415926535: first off, I appreciate your work and consideration in taking the time to do a partial revert, and apologize for responding lazily with individual edits instead of coming here first.
To the matter at hand: "The railroads were merged in 1838 as the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad (PW&B)." "Merged as [product of the merger]" is a vanishingly uncommon structure—so much so that I took it as ungrammatical until finding an example cited by Merriam-Webster. That lone example notwithstanding, it would be clearer and less jarring to the reader to simply write "The railroads merged in 1838, becoming the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad (PW&B)." PRRfan (talk) 04:56, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

@PRRfan: It's a subtle point, but "...merged in 1838, becoming..." implies that the PW&B was a distinct legal entity from either of its predecessors. (One of which, confusingly, was named "The Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad".) It's not clear from the sources whether that was the case - it may have instead been that one railroad was renamed, and the other was merged into it. I'm open to other wordings, but we should be careful not to imply something that we're not actually sure is true. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 02:53, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

"It cut rival Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) off from access to the PW&B when an existing trackage rights agreement expired in 1884" 
would be better rendered as 
"It ended rival Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O)'s access to the PW&B in 1884 when a trackage-rights agreement expired". 
Here's why: 1) Putting six words (including the abbreviation) between "cut" and "off" is hardly optimal; the reader expects "off" to come right after "cut" or not at all. So this would be better as "It cut off rival Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O)'s access..." which has the additional virtue of eliminating the needless "from". But 2) "ended" is better than "cut off" because it removes the ambiguity about whether the severing of ties was permanent. And 3) moving the date earlier in the sentence is better because it acknowledges the PRR's desire to end B&O access as the key element, rather than the instrument of the cutoff (the expiring agreement). The compound adjective also needs a hyphen. PRRfan (talk) 05:13, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

@PRRfan: I've reworded those sentences for clarity - see this edit. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 03:30, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

I'll be that guy since this was nominated for GA: do sources actually call this the "Amtrak Susquehanna River Bridge", or is this old-style "disambiguation" and should actually be at Susquehanna River Bridge (Amtrak) or some such? Mackensen (talk) 16:23, 27 December 2024 (UTC)

@Mackensen: Amtrak uses "Susquehanna River Rail Bridge", but that seems to be a neologism invented for the project - I don't seem any pre-2010 uses of the phrase. It's also ambiguous with a dozen other notable rail bridges across the river, including the nearby CSX Susquehanna River Bridge and the Rockville Bridge (the latter of which is also used by Amtrak). "Susquehanna River Bridge" appears in some other sources, like the HAER documentation and the 2007 Amtrak Ink article. I'm inclined to go with Susquehanna River Bridge (Northeast Corridor) for the sake of reducing ambiguity. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 22:15, 27 December 2024 (UTC)
@Pi.1415926535 Amtrak's ETT calls it the Susquehanna River Movable Bridge, which appears to be at least somewhat unique? Mackensen (talk) 11:06, 27 April 2025 (UTC)
Unfortunately it's unique in both senses - I can't find anything other than ETTs using that name. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 21:55, 27 April 2025 (UTC)

Hiya, Pi.1415926535. This rv ("Remove citation bloat") caught my eye. Why do you consider adding archive links citation bloat? PRRfan (talk) 02:00, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

For stable, non-paywalled sources, I don't see a need to preemptively add an archive link. It makes the wikitext more complicated and causes the references section to take up more space on a screen. Additionally, the access dates added by the bot are both inaccurate (they represent the time the edit is saved, rather than when the source was actually accessed) and redundant (the archive date is what matters, especially for sources like PDFs that aren't likely to change over time.) Pi.1415926535 (talk) 04:24, 2 May 2025 (UTC)
Thanks. I hear your concerns about making the wikitext more complicated and the ref section longer. I guess there's nothing to be done about that, besides not adding the link or hoping that the Internet Archive or WM will gin up a link-shortening service. And I hear you on the inaccurate access date. I'm just an ignorant bot user, so changing that directly is beyond my ken, but I'll see whether I can ask the makers to fix that.
But let me push back gently on the idea of "stable, non-paywalled sources". I've been around long enough to see ostensibly stable, non-paywalled sources delete not just individual webpages cited in WP, but entire bodies of my own work. Forgive me if I doubt their existence. As for the specific websites archived in my recent edit, the PRRHTS and Amtrak, I have seen content disappear from both. More broadly, neither a hobby site nor, in this day and age, a (quasi-)federal government site has any guarantee of URL stability or content permanence. What do you think? PRRfan (talk) 13:22, 2 May 2025 (UTC)
I do see your point there. (I would call the PRRHTS a historical society rather than a hobby site, though.) I think it's generally fine to just make sure that archives are available (such as by running IABot and reverting, or archiving the page with outlinks on archive.org) - it's easy to run the bot if a single source goes offline, and there are folks who do specialized bot/AWB runs on request if a whole domain goes offline. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 20:31, 2 May 2025 (UTC)
Heh; yes, no offense intended to my PRRHTS friends. And I take your point that the critical step is ensuring that cited sources are archived in the IA. I would argue, though, that explicitly providing a link to the archived version in the citation saves the (minor) work of reverting the edit produced by an IABot run and, more importantly, reduces uncertainty ("Is that cite backed up or not?"). But I don't need to press my case further here, and in grateful recognition of your work on getting this article to GA status, I will leave it free of more bloaty archive links.
I will say that I haven't previously encountered your way of thinking about them; I believe it may be a minority view. I will look for broader discussion elsewhere, and in the meantime continue to add archive links to other pages, at least for now. Thanks for the discussion! PRRfan (talk) 23:13, 2 May 2025 (UTC)