Talk:Northern Central Railway

message: Wikify clean-up. Needs cats and verification.--Dakota ~  ° 07:31, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: I've been working with Robert Gunnarsson's history of the Northern Central Railroad, which was a commissioned research project; in the Preface he discusses the extensive research he conducted and some of the safeguards he used to make sure he had accurate information. While it's produced by a small regional-history publisher, it seems like a reputable source.  (I am a college English professor who teaches students to check and cite their own sources, so I do have some experience with this.)
Right now I've used the full source info for every note, but once I'm finished, I'll use that complete form the first time I cite Gunnarsson, and then after that I'll try to use the "named reference" format to present abbreviated references to different pages in his texts.
I'm new to this particular process, so bear with me if I go wrong, and please feel free to offer advice. James Postema (talk) 04:52, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I will also be adding information to the several "stub" paragraphs about additional railroad charters.  As I work through the histories of these lines, I may need to do some reorganization to help make the timeline clear of when several things happened in the early 1830s. James Postema (talk) 23:56, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

text: I've added some introductory material at the start of the "Early History" section, rather than doing a wholesale revision.  The new material can set up the complicated contexts for the early building, growth, and problems of the railroad. I may use subheadings to distinguish the different railroad lines that came into play here. James Postema (talk) 04:55, 1 February 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: With the addition of subheadings and other information further on, I removed the section's introductory sentence.  More to come in cleaning up the short paragraphs after the section on the York and Maryland Line Rail Road. James Postema (talk) 03:21, 8 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citations will be cleaned up 

message: I removed one undocumented sentence that mentioned a Pennsylvania charter for the "Adams County Railroad," because I don't think that information is relevant in this article.  The Adams County line was never built, according to the removed sentence itself, and I could find very little information about it elsewhere.  The two reference sources I'm using do mention Gettysburg, but not an Adams County Railroad.  The Northern Central Railway (NCR) itself never entered Adams County but stayed more or less consistently on the north-south line between Baltimore and Harrisburg.  The "Adams County Railroad" might have been planned to connect to the Green Spring Branch north from Westminster, Maryland, to Gettysburg, but that's just an assumption, and in fact the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad never extended that line past Owings Mills, Maryland.  (Later on a company that became the Western Maryland Railroad would extend the Green Spring Branch, but as their own track.)  Even if it had been built, the Adams County line would have connected only indirectly to the NCR.  So without any information in reference sources, and no actual connection to the NCR, that information did not seem like it should be kept in this article. James Postema (talk) 03:16, 16 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removing information about "Adams County Railroad" 

message: After completing a fairly substantial rewrite of the whole "Early History" section, with detailed reference notes, I believe that it was justifiable to remove the warning that the section lacked citations. It now has careful citations throughout, referring back to two reliable sources, though the majority came from just one source, Robert Gunnarsson's history of the Northern Central Railway. James Postema (talk) 01:55, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed warning that the "Early History" section required more citations 

message: Just a note to say that my recent minor edits were my last for this article. My chief interest lay in the complications and shenanigans leading up to the consolidation that created the Northern Central and then transferred control and ownership to the Pennsylvania Railroad.  
I am not a Civil War buff, so I don't have the knowledge or interest to provide the citations which that section could still use.  I invite others to do so. James Postema (talk) 01:06, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  My final edits