Talk:Poyle Estate Halt railway station

"Disused" misused

A favorite for WP railway catergorisers and "previous-and-succeeding"ers is "Disused" but much of what they so class is not disused but utterly done away with. If a gate, for example, is permanently barred it is disused; if its place in the wall has been bricked in then the gate is not disused, though it may well come in the category of former gates in Salop. --SilasW (talk) 12:54, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

The word "disused" comes up four times in the entire atricle as displayed.

• in the infobox, which has a link to Disused railway stations in the United Kingdom. That is a characteristic of {{Infobox UK disused station}}; that infobox seemed to me the best available - of the others, {{Infobox GB station}} is for stations outside the TfL area which still have a service; {{Infobox London station}} is for stations inside the TfL area, again which still have a service; {{Infobox Closed London station}} is for stations which at one time had an LU, LRT or TfL service, which Poyle Estate Halt didn't; and {{Infobox UK heritage station}} is for stations now in use as part of preserved railways
• in a reference, as http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/p/poyle_estate_halt/index.shtml - I can't control how external websites describe themselves
• in the succession box showing which were the stations on either side. The choices were "Disused railways" or "Historical railways" - and the latter is generally used for lines which still have a passenger service, which does not call at this station.
• in Category:Disused railway stations in Berkshire - railway station articles are placed in the most suitable sub-category of Category:Railway stations in the United Kingdom. This includes such categories as Category:Railway stations in Berkshire, which is for stations which are still open, and Category:Disused railway stations in Berkshire, for those which are no longer open. The question of whether "disused" is a suitable term for categories like this has been brought up at WT:UKRAIL before; one such recent case went to Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2010 April 1#Category:Disused railway stations in the United Kingdom.

WT:UKRAIL is a better place for discussing the topic of the suitability of "disused" as a term, rather than on the talk page of a railway station that has few watchers. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:45, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Gates and railway stations/lines are very different things. A gate may be removed, but an abandoned railway generally leaves its traces, whether that is through remaining sections of trackbed/structures, conversion of former buildings or references to lost transport links (signs, road names etc). A gate may well disappear unnoticed, but books are written on lost lines and associations are formed to preserve/reopen/walk the remains. In this case, the line/station is "disused", in the sense of a thing now fallen into desuetude, irrespective of whether that thing still exists as it once did. However, if the line is still in use, the word "historical" is used. Lamberhurst (talk) 15:16, 1 July 2010 (UTC)