Introduction to the Railway Knowledge Base

This Wiki has been conceived out of a need to see a more organised way of storing and presenting information on the web about rail heritage matters in New Zealand. The key to unlocking that came after I developed a new way of presenting the railway network in a compact way, initially as a spreadsheet. This has now been successfully translated into a wiki table that you can see here and is accessible from a link on the main page. I hope to have the North Island completed by June 2021 which will then provide some 3000 pages where any information relating to railway tracks and facilities can be saved in a very structured way, and quickly found again.

Due to the way I have created the network Diagrams (by using a very large table structure), I have had to work around some of the Mediawiki constraints associated with tables. There is a lot of automatic formatting built in to the tables and to prevent that 'messing-up' my carefully designed layout, I have had to force the table width to stay very large (3 times the width of my wide-screen laptop). This in turn means you need to use the slider at the bottom of the main window to conveniently move across the page (or use the mouse scroll with the ctrl key depressed). There may be more to learn here yet so I am still hoping a fix can be found for this. Having to use the main computer window, rather than a browser window, also means these diagrams are not at all practical for small screen mobile devices. Again this is an area that we can start some serious discussion about and there may be ways that smaller portions of the diagram are able to be separately accessible i.e. by an individual Railway Line where you would have an option to 'jump sideways' to its originating (or destination) Line, or other branch-lines. Ultimately the users will dictate how things develop beyond this initial attempt.

While this first step in creating a wiki only deals with railway facilities, have a look at the Vision page to get an idea of some of the directions this wiki could head.

Of course this wiki only provides a structure for holding data, the actual data has to be gathered and formatted for presentation. That will take time and effort, and clearly an impossible task for one person, hence the decision to make this a Wiki instead of a normal website. The key difference is that with a wiki, anyone can input data whereas a website it is only administrators that have access to modify the site. That said, to keep this wiki as reliable as possible, it is arranged in such a way that only authorised 'editors' will have access to editing the main topic pages, but most other pages will be able to be edited by any registered user, with the Data Entry pages aimed at being the main input pages for users. Registration is a simple process that just allows the administrators to track data back to an email address if necessary, to avoid malicious access or unhelpful data being submitted.

To get things started, I have made use of the Station Archive file, a table of some 70,000 entries of facts relating to each station. Some of those facts are duplicated, some are trivial but together they help provide detail for a story that can be written about each station. The data from the Station Archive file can be accessed by selecting the the tab called File Records at the top of each Station page. Those of you who are keen, could start using that data to create the beginnings of of the Station page articles. This of course should be done on the Discussion or Info Submission pages from where an authorised editor will take that story, format it in a consistent way, and make it available on the Main page for that station.

There is a second file that Juliet created which details the opening and closing dates of Stations. It is intended that this data becomes part of the information box on each station page.

Again, to save time at this stage, the Wikipedia articles for the Main South Island stations have been copied into this wiki to give users some idea of a wiki article. Without being critical, Wikipedia articles are generally scant on detail and this repository will allow as much detail to be entered as one wishes. It would add something special if it contained a good number of personal stories, recollections of happenings and a good record of dates of major changes.

As with any specialised topic, users need to understand what various terms mean so a Glossary of terms is being developed. The Discussion page associated with the Glossary is a good place to ask questions about the exact meaning of something. We will often find that the same term might mean different things in different areas. The main Glossary page is is of course a restricted-edit page as that should ultimately become the agreed meaning (or meanings) of a term, not available for random editing. As every page has a Discussion page, this is where comment about a particular page can be entered and edited by anyone. You need to keep in mind that while you may add something to a discussion page, someone else may prefer to delete it, so, in some ways it is self policing. So, make use of the discussion pages and let your wishes be known so collectively we can work on improving both the layout and data.

In preparing the Network Diagram, I have relied heavily on the Quail Publishing maps, my own knowledge of most parts of the South Island rail network, and many KiwiRail resources. While I can claim rights to the format the data is presented in, the information itself is generally in the public domain. Images however tend to have a rightful 'owner' and all efforts will be made to respect those.

A few introductory notes on using the Railway Knowledge Base

Provided you are working on a desktop computer, it is a good idea to become familiar with the Network diagram(s) first. They are based on a grid, in columns of 3 cells, a narrow one either side of a wider one. The wider columns hold the Station names that apply to a particular railway Line,

The top of the screen represents north and the right side of the screen represents east, just like a standard map. Every railway-line has a name and the Line name is in a blue shaded double with cell at the start of every Line. Using the term Start straightaway tells you that a railway-line has a direction and it is important to understand which direction ha particular Line has. Sometimes a Railway-line is connected to another Line at its end, to make it clear that that is the end, the Line-name at that end is shaded orange.

The start of one Railway-line is connected to another at a Junction and these links are represented by horizontal lines from the Junction station on one Line to the start of the other Line. Every Junction has an arrow (or two) to indicate from what direction a train movement can access the Branch-line.

Every cell forming a Railway-line is shaded, with the colour representing the status of the Line. You will quickly notice that most Lines are shaded pink, indicating the Line is closed. There are a few shaded light blue, indicating that they are mothballed but do still physically exist. Those that are shaded green are still operated by KiwiRail, and those shaded grey are operated by heritage groups. Yellow shaded Lines were privately operated but either used NZR rollingstock or had their own rollingstock which was allowed to run on the connected NZR tracks.

Otherwise, the columns of Railway-line data are made up of Station names and small symbols like so ][, representing a section of track between stations. Each name or symbol has a hyperlink associated with it so clicking on the name or symbol will open the specific wiki page associated with that cell, Using the back arrow will take you back to the diagram.

The network diagrams are great for browsing a particular are you might be interested as it gives you a good feel for what is or was in the area.

You can of course just type a station name in the search box at the top right of the screen, this will present you with a list of all occurrences of that station name in the wiki. The list will have the main page for that station (or track section) at the top, making it easy to get to.

Once you are on a station page, you will notice some standard items. At the right is an information box that summarises the main details about that Station. You need to remember that we are talking about the whole station yard here not just the station building, although there may well be/have been, a station-building in the yard, in which case it will be mentioned. At the bottom right of the heading panel, there are some important links that allow you to move 'along' the railway-line. Again, keeping in mind the direction of the Line, you can move to the next or previous stations, but also to the next or previous track-sections. These links allow you to travel-the-track just like a train with the opportunity to learn a lot as you go.

There is a special band of information titled Categories at the bottom of the page. This lists the pages that the current page is linked to by way of the Page-name, and here too we have a few regulars. Every Station page is linked to a page called Stations, which is an alphabetical list of all Station names in the wiki. There are some 800 names in the South Island so we will have around 1750 for the whole country. Every Station page also has a link to a Railway-lines page, which is a list of all Railway-lines in the Wiki. There are over 120 Line names shown on the South Island diagram so there will be some 200 in the whole country. Many Railway-lines have had multiple names over the years and only some of the more important alternative names are shown on the Network Diagrams to help clarify what that name referred to. Each of these Line names will of course have their own wiki page, eventually with a detailed description of the Lines history.

Across the top of each Station page there are a number of tabs which allow rapid movement between the main-page and standard sub-pages. I will briefly look at each one separately.

• Discussion:- Because rail-fans like to agree and disagree, and the fact that there will always be differing opinions on a subject, here is a place to air your views about the topic the page refers to. It is important to stay 'on-topic' otherwise the wiki quickly becomes a clutter of comment that looses any form of structure. Remember, that material can and will be removed from pages if it is deemed inappropriate, or irrelevant to the main-page title.
• File Records:- This page is a copy of the data in the Station Archive file relating to the specific station. This file was created by Juliet Scobel for the Rail Heritage Trust of New Zealand and represents many hours of sifting through old files for relevant information It is in a table format with one line per item of information. Some stations have very few or even no lines of data, whereas others can have several hundred. The data is in no particular order but I have left a column at the start which can be used to mark those items that have been covered by text in the main article.
• Info Submission:- This is where users can add their own information about the page. This should be either in story form, just as typed paragraphs, or just a series of statements similar to what is on the File Records tab
• Published Refs:- I expect this will quickly become a much liked and used sub-page. I personally will use it as a memory bank for info I am unlikely to remember but likely to want to remember. I see it including a list of photo references in publications and info snippet you come across in books or magazines. It logically feels like this needs to be in a table format similar to the File Records tab and would be able to be filtered and sorted.
• Page Notes:- This page which is where comment about the current page's content and layout should be made. Ideally it becomes a quick reference for Authorised Editors to know what users are wanting to see changed and could include prepared text for inclusion

We have looked quite a bit at what is available on the Station pages, but there are also the Track-section pages that cover sometimes many kilometres of railway-line between Stations. As I have no magic wand to collect and enter this data, it will of necessity be the slower part of the wiki to grow. My aim is to add some basic info about these sections as quickly as possible from information I do have available. For the South Island anyway this should include list of all the bridges and tunnels, and I am sure many users will be able to contribute facts about slips or derailments or special works they are aware of.

Track-section pages will also have links to move between them and the previous or next Stations, but unlike the Station pages, you will not have the option to move from one Track-section to the next, bypassing the station page.

One area I have not covered yet is submitting files for uploading, specifically photos. Again there need to be some rules around what is uploaded which I have not worked through yet. Principally, if you upload an image, we need to know whose image it is. Ideally every image has a standard block of reference data submitted with it, which would include (where known) who took the photo, when where, and is the copy you hold an original or already a copy. It is only fair that the 'originator' of the image be acknowledged if at all possible and if you do not know who that might be, someone else may, so that would become information that gets added over time.

Lastly, having just looked at importing files, I also want to mention that the aim is to make it easy to export information from the wiki.