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is this watsessing or watsessing avenue? no way to tell. signs at the place say both as does njtransit schedule. watsessing is the name of the hill and the river the station is near, but watsessing avenue is the street it's on.
— Preceding
unsigned comment added by
Tlantanu (
talk •
contribs) 14:58, March 8, 2009
The article needs proper, wholesale proofreading/copyedit. Some sentences sound odd in part or in their entirety. Some are well understood after a bit of mental work; others are too ambiguous or plain WTF. A confused reader cannot reliably make the sense of them (see Edison example below) - this causes more complaints on factual statements, references etc. This is not a complete list, just examples:
"The proposal in Bloomfield, who had criticized the railroad for making a disgrace of the community." [who criticized whom?]
"Construction was completed on a 1.5 miles (2.4 km) long segment of the Montclair Branch from East Orange to Glen Ridge and was opened [who was?] on November 15, 1912."
"The lot also is paid spaces [not dollars?] six days a week and free on Sundays, with a cost of $20 parking per quarter (three months)." [Are Sundays free or not? Or can I pay $20 for three months and then not pay .25/hour weekday rate?]
"While making the depression, a new trench was dug, which had retaining walls constructed without moving the alignment [clarify] to delay railroad traffic [what's so special about it?]. When the station design was finished, tracks were shifted to make room. [for what?]"
"The station continued to stand through [??] the Montclair Connection on September 30, 2002, which ended [who ended?] the Montclair Branch and began as the Montclair-Boonton Line, still the first station on the line after Newark Broad Street Station."
"The station served as the third station on the Montclair Branch, which was first electrified by technology used by Thomas Alva Edison in 1930" [did Edison use it in 1930 (he died in 1931, so why not), or ... ?]
Consider delisting from GAN if you cannot fix it all or recruit outside copyeditors. I'd recommend copy-pasting plain text, excluding all format and footnotes, printing it at double intervals, and then just read it from paper. Check
Tony's tutorial too.
I'd strongly discourage inclusion of fluid, ephemeral data like timetables or the capacity of local parking lots. They change all the time. This is a good reason to have
WP:NOTDIR. Ask yourself: who will maintain the in-article timetable, train numbers etc. in 2012? in 2014? Specific examples:
As for the long paragraph on departures and arrivals, I'd recommend trimming it to something like "In the summer of 2010 [or even narrower time scope] 23 of 30 inbound trains stopped at Watsessing station. The first one stopped at X.XX, the last one at XX.XX." - no train numbers. If you need to cite ephemeral data, say when did you take the snapshot.
Parking lots. 14-car lots aren't really important. Just say "There are two parking lots, of such-and-such combined capacity, paid $$$/hour on weekdays and free on Sundays."
Many grammatically correct sentences are loaded with unnecessary words.
"A second lot is present at the intersection of Myrtle Street and Walnut Street." [present is unnecessary. OT, googlemaps shows that the entrance if from mid-block Myrtle; the lot is separated from the intersection by some trees.]
Some of these concerns stem from the same prose quiality issue:
The article uses word
depot for railroad station building. This is in line with US English usage, but needs to be clarified for the rest of the world. Have you considered not using the ambiguous word?
Railroad station building sounds even more ambiguous. Depot stays as far as my opinion goes.
PBA in the lead needs to be linked (even if the acronym is expanded, Benevolent Association must be linked). The PBA website mentions only one location (1 Municipal Plaza), far away. Do they still use the station? Again, a matter of time-stamping information that may change at any moment (tenants come and go).
The passage on 1911-1912 mentions many dollar figures, but riddles the reader - who paid what? Just how much of the costs were born by the town, and how much by the RR? "The park cost the township $50,000 to buy" - did they buy it from the RR or from other owners? May I suggest: read every statement and fix or remove anything that raises questions instead of answering them.
"The station depot was built over the railroad tracks with four concrete arch girders to structure the building." -
girder and
arch are two distinct structural elements. They don't mix up (it's kind of square circle).
"A four-inch ceiling was constructed and the station was widened to take more movement of trains." - More like what? Like adding another track, or widening the clearance of the pre-existing tracks? Also, consider separating description of ceiling from clearance. Also, clarify which ceiling - the platform sheds, or the bottom of the station house above the tracks?
"It reduced service, reducing the once two-rail alignment to one" - Does it mean "It removed one of two tracks" or simply "shut down one of two tracks"? Plus, two reduce in one sentence.
"In 1983, this took effect and just one year later, the line became a temporary diesel rail line as the overhead catenary wires had to be adjusted." a) what took effect (previous sentence makes it ambiguous) b) what does "adjusted" mean? Is it just routine maintenance, or something big like switching from DC to AC?
Please replace depression in captions with something else (track realignment? grade separation?) to disambiguate from the
Great Depression. Which is the first thing that springs to mind reading U.S. history articles.
I've changed it, but I absolutely disagree with people. How does having track in front of it make some think of the 1929 Depression? :| That's not so important in my eyes. But to satisfy you, I changed it.Mitch32(
TransportationHistorian)19:15, 2 September 2010 (UTC)reply