There is an old railway saying that goes “If you haven’t heard a rumour by lunchtime, then start a new one”. This leads to all kinds of harebrained discussion threads wherever railfans congregate, as well as Wikipedia articles such as this snippet I found the other day:
Tottenham Yard
Tottenham Yard was opened in the western suburb of Tottenham from the 1920s as part of a project to improve freight movement in Victoria. The majority of freight traffic in the state was from the north or western areas, and was being remarshalled into trains at Melbourne Yard. This caused inefficiencies with the large number of trains needing to enter the Melbourne city, so the yard was opened for the marshalling of trains before they were sent to Melbourne Yard.
Laid with broad gauge trackage, Tottenham is a gravitational yard with a slight slope from the Sunshine end towards the city. The yard consists of four groups of sidings: arrival roads, two groups of classification roads, and departure tracks. Heavy usage of the yard ended with the gauge conversion of the main line to Adelaide in 1995, and with the decline of broad gauge traffic in general, large areas of the yard are now used for wagon storage. Tottenham station is located to the south of the yard.
The part conversion of Tottenham Yard to standard gauge is expected to commence next year which will allow larger Standard Gauge freight trains to terminate at Tottenham with trip working from the yard to Melbourne and return.
What caught my eye was the “expected to commence next year” line in the final paragraph, which lacked any mention of the date when the statement was originally written. So when was this “partial conversion to standard gauge” supposed to have started?
Thankfully Wikipedia makes available the full edit history of each and every article available, which makes tracking down the source of the statement just a few clicks away – 19 July 2011!
Three years on, and nothing has happened on the partial conversion of Tottenham Yard to standard gauge front – yet another railfan rumour that came to nothing!
Reminds me of the Wikipedia revision that flagged the proposed Southland station as Premium, based on no evidence whatsoever.
I stumble upon ‘facts’ like that far too often!
Partial conversion to standard gauge seems like a good idea. Could also potentially allow, subject to bypassing the Adelaide Hills, double stacked trains between Adelaide and Tottenham (the Bunbury St tunnel is to shallow (did the RRL rebuild of the bridge over the freight lines allow for double stacking?))
All of the new RRL works over the ARTC goods lines should be built to double-stack standards – the stations at Sunshine and West Footscray are stupidly high, as is the replacement HV McKay Footbridge at Sunshine.
Wikipedia is a User Edited service and it can be edited easily
And as a result of that, parts of Wikipedia are as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica:
http://news.cnet.com/Study-Wikipedia-as-accurate-as-Britannica/2100-1038_3-5997332.html
The problem is in the lesser frequented corners of the site that deal with more niche topics – the people who do visit think “X” is something is worth adding, but there isn’t anyone around to say “that isn’t verifiable”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability