Talk:List of railway bridges and viaducts in the United Kingdom

What are the Wicker Arches?

The Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway Co viaduct in Sheffield, at the site of Sheffield Victoria Station was named the Victoria Viaduct. No entry for this can be found in Wikipeadia. In Sheffield it is almost universally referred to as the Wicker Arches and has a wiki page of that name. I am suggesting changes to Wikipeadia articles and references to this structure. Please post all comments and opinions on the Talk:Sheffield page.

--Waugh Bacon (talk) 23:23, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

Duplicates/replaced bridges and viaducts

In some places, a bridge or viaduct has been replaced in the same or almost the same location by another one which usually takes the same name. This happened to Brunel's Cornwall Railway viaducts when the timber trestles were replaced by stone arches. In these cases, should there be

1. Two (or more) entries, one for each version, differentiated by date
2. A single entry, mentioning both versions (ie both dates, both materials, two pictures if available) or
3. Only entries for those versions considered 'significant'

There is ambiguity in some entries, for example Cartuther viaduct is described only as 'replaced 1882', with no hint of what was replaced by what. -- Verbarson  ^talk_edits 23:19, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

Notability

Similar to the List of tunnels in the United Kingdom page, what's the criteria for inclusion here? "viaducts and significant bridges" is a very loose definition, and there's a fair few in this list that 1) aren't listed 2) do not have a standalone article about them 3) are not of significant length. This list should not be an indiscriminate list of every old bridge in the UK, that's not what wikipedia is for. Thoughts? Turini2 (talk) 10:50, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

I think the list should be restricted to only those structures that have articles. Then it's very easy to repel new entries with a simple WP:WTAF. 10mmsocket (talk) 10:54, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

I agree. An entry on a list is not encyclopaedic information. If there is no linkable article (or section) to explain why it merits attention, then it shouldn't be listed.

Enforcing this would remove numerous entries that are notable (eg nationally listed structures) and 'deserve' an article, but the article should be written first, and then be added it to the list. -- Verbarson  ^talk_edits 11:38, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

Personally I would leave the ones that are listed - at present, there's around 20 that have some listing grade without an article. Someone else (Historic England etc) has considered them to be nationally significant, so imo they warrant inclusion. Turini2 (talk) 18:01, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

Redlinks are an important part of building the site (and are an editing guideline), whereas only including entries with an article (WTAF is only an essay) will result in an incomplete and therefore flawed list. Notability should definitely be demonstrated, but the list should include bridges with an article AND those which don't but are heritage-listed or similarly recognised. The lead should also be changed to reflect these inclusion criteria. Crowsus (talk) 19:20, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

• I'd be fine with inclusion criteria of listed bridges or bridges that have their own article. More pressingly, there are over 500 entries on this list and there must be dozens that could be included. If the list is to stay, it should probably be split up into separate lists for each nation and English regions or counties for navigability. But I'm not sure what purpose that would serve that categories don't. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 19:37, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

  I would also be happy to split the article into English, Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish lists. Though currently a Google search for "longest railway bridges in the uk" brings up this article as the third result (after the HS2 website and a news article on HS2). It would be a shame to lose this, could we perhaps retain a list here of the longest, tallest, most arches, etc while including links to the sub articles I mentioned earlier? Garuda3 (talk) 20:46, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

  Ah yes, I noticed that 2 of the viaducts on HS1 (Thurrock and Ashford, both over 1000m in length) are missing from the list - they'd be in the top 10 by length! Turini2 (talk) 14:13, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

• I like lists like this - what they give that categories do not is a snippet/key fact/image so I can browse through and read a couple of articles that pique my curiosity. I agree that the list has become unwieldy, and our top priority must be reader experience rather than editor satisfaction. There are many poor lists on WP, this is already one of the better ones, but we can be guided by existing well-ordered lists. Several lists already state their criteria for addition with a concise, clear instruction in the lead to only add items with an existing WP article or heritage listed status. I support doing this here, per Crowsus' comment. Per Verbarson's comment about including yet-unwritten notable titles, that is also useful for the work of the WP:ORPHAN project, as often those articles do already exist and simply need linking. If we can agree on the criteria, we can compose that into a lead note, and then sift the existing entries per those criteria. I suggest also that rather than dividing into countries (too few divisions and the England section would still be extremely long) or counties (too many divisions, massive contents box would fill the first screen view, and county boundaries are regularly tweaked), we could go with A-Z division to make easy navigation for someone looking for a specific bridge, I propose using Template:Alphanumeric TOC. Finally, I think a few of the entries are too verbose especially where the bridge already has an article, including the very first one at Accrington Viaduct, it looks clunky (on my 15" laptop at least) where the summary description requires more height than the image. Baldy Bill (sharpen the razor|see my reflection) 23:43, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

  I agree - and I therefore propose a lead of "This is a list of significant viaducts and bridges of the United Kingdom's railways, including historic structures, as well as structures of significant length or height."

  I also propose criteria for inclusion in the list:

  • a standalone article about the bridge/viaduct, or
  • a heritage listing at any grade, or
  • significant length/height (perhaps over 150m in length?)

  Turini2 (talk) 14:23, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

  • Support these proposed criteria and wording varied to "significant (>150m) length or height." Baldy Bill (sharpen the razor|see my reflection) 20:45, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

    Top ten longest/highest/oldest entries: If it is desirable to present such information (and I do not disagree with that), then it should not be done by making the whole table sortable by length/height/date columns, for a number of reasons:

    • It would prevent the otherwise desirable (IMHO) splitting of the list by initial letter
    • It would require the top ten in each category to be present on the list, even if not otherwise notable and without a linked article
    • It would treat Wikipedia as an authority, determining the top ten from WP's own data

    Rather, there should be three separate lists (probably at the top of the article), one for the top ten of each dimension, at a given date, and referenced to a WP:RS. It may be necessary to restrict any list to less than ten, if a RS is only available for the top five, say. If no RS can be found, then the top ten lists should be ditched. Entries on these lists should only be linked if an article is present. -- Verbarson  ^talk_edits 21:18, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

    I disagree - I think sorting by location is fine, similar to the List of tunnels in the United Kingdom page. The longest/highest bridge can be referenced in the lead. It's wikipedia, tables are there to be sorted! Turini2 (talk) 22:26, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

    The Tunnel list has a 'County' column, which is more specific than 'Location'. (It also has its own issues - my current location has been in at least four different county-level areas in the last fifty years alone.)

    Location is actually a hierarchical structure (Country - sub-country (ie England/Scotland etc) - Town/District - Hamlet/Parish) which is not reflected in the Location column. Sorting by the current Location data will bring together all the entries starting 'between...' or 'near ...', as well as all those located at 'River ...' - hardly a useful ordering.

    Sorting can also be misleading when not all entries have the relevant column filled in, and is quite ridiculous for the 'Notes' column. -- Verbarson  ^talk_edits 14:11, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

DURHAM COASTAL VIADUCTS

Hi The Durham coastal line viaducts are missing from your list. Horden and Crimdon being the most notable. John Pallister 2A0E:1D40:803:4800:2885:CBB6:8464:2F5C (talk) 07:52, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Hi John, We'd love to include them, but lists should point to articles, and we don't have articles on those viaducts. If you have good sources of information, feel free to get involved and start articles for them. If these viaducts are on the Durham Coast Line, they could be added to that article - it already has a photo of Denemouth Viaduct. -- Verbarson  ^talk_edits 10:20, 3 April 2023 (UTC)