Talk:Wallkill Valley Rail Trail

Springtown bridge

I have a photo of a placard put up by the Rail Trail Association describing the length of the Springtown bridge, but I'm not sure how (or if I can) cite this.
--Gyrobo (talk) 22:55, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Done. Found a print source.
--Gyrobo (talk) 16:31, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

A-class proposal

I'm making this proposal for an A-class review of this article.
--Gyrobo (talk) 02:59, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

After review I regret very much that I cannot support this as an A-class at present. It's a strong article, well-researched and sourced, with lovely photography. But it falls short for the following reasons:

• No route description section: It would be a few paragraphs long and would give nice background to the reader, helping to give context to the somewhat fragmented presentation of information like trailheads and bridges elsewhere in the article. Just about every other article we have on a linear route of some type (road, hiking trail, etc.) describes what the route is like.

  And in that context a map of the trail's current route would be helpful. The map lab could make a free, readable one from existing information.

• Too much information: One of the pitfalls of extensively researching a topic for a Wikipedia article is that you put so much effort into doing so that you feel you've got to show your work to justify it. This article gives us a great deal of information about bridge dimensions, construction dates, sale dates, how much (unrounded, yet!) someone owed in back taxes, where companies were located, and so forth. After reading it, my brain hurts. A lot of it isn't directly relevant to the story of the rail trail.

  And another effect, which to be fair, I got reamed over for myself once, is that there are a lot of footnotes breaking up the sentences, hampering readability.

  You've gotta keep the end result in mind when you do research. Example story: back in college, one of my English professors told us once about a research project he'd been part of, a paper on the letters of some of the pre-Raphaelites. One of them made a passing reference to some recent event that sounded like an earthquake (when translated from Italian, their preferred language for correspondence), and he was delegated to find out whether there really had been one, or it was just some poetic flourish (the sort of thing they were known to do). There was nothing in any official records ... well, earthquakes are somewhat rare in Britain and they didn't keep good records since they didn't expect them. He looked through English newspapers archived in the school library from the date in question (consider how most 19th-century newspapers read ... not easy) and found nothing. But just to be sure, he scanned the next few days for any delayed reportage. Instead, he found a batch of letters to the editor from people asking if other people had felt the same tremor. He found these in multiple newspapers, and brought the cites back to his group. The end result was this footnote: "There was, in fact, an earthquake on that day".

• The gallery section. Not really in keeping with policy. Per it, most of these, the ones taken by rock nj, can be moved to Commons ... some might even be used to illustrate the route description. Even without them, there are definitely enough there to sustain a Commons category for the rail trail.

I would be glad to write a route description section, move images to Commons, and otherwise help make these improvements. The good news is that the article we want is here—we just need to edit our way down to it. However, if I were to assume a more active role, someone else would have to make the A-class approvals (or, better yet, we could skip that and go straight to FAC). Would that be OK? Daniel Case (talk) 06:04, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

I've been thinking for a while about creating a separate Bridges of the Wallkill Valley Railroad article. Most of the history section centers around the bridges; I thought it was critical to get as in-depth as possible about the landmarks along the trail. I didn't really have a frame of reference, since almost all other New York rail trail articles are stubs. There's also a bridge in Montgomery, which would be included in such an article; I don't have a photo of it, though. I'll start that article pretty soon. If you wanted to move all of Rock nj's rail trail images to the commons, I've never done such a move, and wouldn't oppose your help. The least I can do is give you a handy list:

• File:Walkill Rail Trail View.jpg
• File:Wallkill River From Trail.jpg
• File:Rosendale NY.jpg
• File:Wallkill River Bridge.jpg
• File:Gardiner NY Rail Trail.jpg

The Perls book has a nice route description, I'll take a crack at writing a route section soon.

--Gyrobo (talk) 16:01, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

I definitely think you could get away with a separate article on the Rosendale trestle, as it's got a claim to independent notability as the highest such bridge in the country at the time of its construction. Daniel Case (talk) 17:35, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

I've started an article in userspace at User:Gyrobo/Rosendale trestle. It's mostly just a move of the current content about the bridge. I can totally see what you meant, the entire Rosendale history section was just about the bridge.
--Gyrobo (talk) 01:59, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

I've moved the trestle article from userspace to Rosendale trestle (and nominated it for GA), and cut down the Rosendale subsection considerably.
--Gyrobo (talk) 03:07, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Land Trust disclosure

Per a potential WP:CONFLICT, I just wanted to disclose that I've sent some emails to the Wallkill Valley Land Trust asking them to write up a post describing their policies on maintenance and motor vehicle use during their ownership of the Gardiner section, and to describe in greater detail which party owns which part of the Rosendale purchase. They say that they're the sole owner of everything between New Paltz and the trestle, while they and the Open Space Conservancy jointly own everything north of the land development, and that the land development encompasses 1+1⁄2 miles (2.4 km) of the trail and that the developer is still seeking approval to run the trail through their land. I don't think this would violate WP:SELFPUBLISH, because none of this seems self-serving, and because there really aren't that many sources for the history of the Gardiner section, other than a town grant proposal.
--Gyrobo (talk) 17:11, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

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