Category talk:Narrow gauge railways

message: Is this list intended only for active narrow-gauge systems?Plasma east 19:25, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Intention of this list 

message: How does one add the Rorschach-Heiden-Bahn? it's just one that is "missing" from this list --Peter Horn 02:30, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: According to the article, it's actually a standard gague railway. I've added it to :Category:Mountain railways. For more information about adding an article to a category, please see Wikipedia:Category. Ae-a 10:39, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Adding the [[Rorschach-Heiden-Bahn]] 

message: This category is getting pretty large, with nearly 300 articles in it already and I suspect there is room for many more as we expand coverage of narrow gauge railways on Wikipedia. Some time soon it would make sense to split this into sub-categories to make it easier for readers to use. I cxan think of two obvious categorization schemes:
#By country so we'd have a :Category:British narrow gauge railways and a :Category:Greek narrow gauge railways etc.
#By gauge so there'd be :Category:Two foot gauge railways, :Category:Three foot gauge railways etc.
For the "by gauge" categories, there would be some looseness to the categories, so for example the  gauge railways would be in the  gauge category.
Which option do people prefer? Are there other, better options? I'm happy to do the work or recategorizing, but I'm not sure what the best scheme is. Thanks for your input. Gwernol 15:02, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually I'd like to see both! Category by gauge has some technical issues - for instance are you going to group close gauges together ie 750-760-762mm, or split them into exact gauge. If the latter, you would be best to use metric measurements, and note the imperial measurement as a subtitle. If I had to make a choice I'd probably go for by country. BTW the category seems to have suddenly shrunk! --Michael Johnson 00:27, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

text: Yes, I'm was bold and went ahead. Thinking about it further I thought that since we are dealing with railways defined by their gauge in the first place, splitting down further by gauge makes sense. As you say, there's no reason why we can't also include other categories based on geography or other criteria. In fact a lot of these railways are already in one geographical category or another. On the question of gauges, my thought was to group "similar" gauges together with fairly narrow bounds where different gauges are grouped together. For gauges that are "naturally" imperial they would be named that way; for metric gauges we'd use the metric name. This gives us something along the lines of:
Category                          	Lower bound              	Upper bound
Two foot gauge railways           	                         	2 ft 1 in
Two foot three inch gauge railways	2 ft 1 in 	2 ft 3 in
Two foot six inch gauge railways  	2 ft 4 in 	2 ft 7 in
Three foot gauge railways         	2 ft 11 in	3 ft 2 in
Metre gauge railways              	                         	
Four foot gauge railways          	3 ft 11 in	4 ft 2 in
I've itemised them on the main page - feel free to adujust as you see fit. --Michael Johnson 12:18, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

text: Thanks Michael, that's very useful. I've added imperial measurements so we have both, but I think the set of categories is good. Thanks also for your help in re-assigning some of the article's categories. I think this makes a bit more sense as the main category was getting very crowded. I'm all in favor of also adding the articles to appropriate geographical categories as you suggested. Best, 13:53, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Splitting up the category 

message: I put Stapleford Miniature Railway into two categories, :Category:Miniature railways, as well as the appropriate narrow gauge subcategory. Can someone who knows about such things confirm that's correct. Thanks, CiaranG 14:19, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi Ciaran, I removed the minimum gauge category since the Stapleford Miniature Railway is a true miniature railway rather than a narrow gauge one. The main difference between the two is that miniature railways use scale models of rolling stock whereas minimum gauge railways don't. Gwernol 15:29, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for that - I figured something was wrong. CiaranG 22:46, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Correct categories?