Talk:Monticello Railway Museum

bad link

The Netflix documentary link is bad

abbreviation and railroad code?

What is the usefulness of including MRM as an abbreviation and MRMZ as the "railroad code" for the museum, in the wikipedia? I see that the footnote reference attached to the MRMZ is a 219 page document meant as an operation guide for preparing accident/incident reports. Please direct me, if this has been discussed elsewhere. Without seeing a usefulness for it, though, I would tend to want to delete those from the intro where they are too salient. Perhaps they could be fields in an infobox, if they do have some particular usefulness. doncram (talk) 06:38, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

I had noticed some back and forth here, but, yikes, i find a huge discussion at Wikipedia:Content noticeboard linked from an edit summary here. Is there a simple explanation that is relevant for this article, though? doncram (talk) 06:45, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

Basically, it's another name for Reporting marks, but avoiding the use of the actual term, in order to avoid the vengeful wrath of an editor who says this organization, among others, doesn't have reporting marks. WuhWuzDat 06:52, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

Well, no; Wuhwuzdat and TimberWolf Railz believe it to be a reporting mark, and rather than finding a reliable source for such, they are adding it as a "railroad code" which has no meaning outside FRA accident reports. --NE2 06:58, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

..Like I said, vengeful wrath...sigh....WuhWuzDat 07:00, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. And, ah, reading the "Reporting marks" article helps. I guess all the rolling stock of railroad needs to be get unique identifiers, and identifiers have also been created for non-rolling items like buildings, but it is not clear whether the latter are properly called reporting marks or not. I did already confirm that MRMZ does appear in the FRA guide, which is a searchable PDF file. Checking now, i find that MRMZ redirects to here and MRM is a dab page listing this museum. No mainspace wikipedia pages link to MRMZ directly; this link here will be the first one from a Talk page.

Where I am coming from is mostly working on U.S. historic sites, where there are multiple systems of identifying codes such as refnums for National Register of Historic Places-listed sites, and state-specific codes in some states, and I also bump into archeological site codes (which might possibly be part of a nation- or world-wide coding of archeological sites). For these, the NRHP refnum usually gets put into an infobox, and any state codes are usually not inserted anywhere at all. The eight-digit refnums are not used in any system of redirects. Many NRHP-listed places are house museums but i've never come across a museum coding system.

I'm not familiar with article style formats for railroad museums per se, but coming from this other perspective and looking at this place as a historic building or as a museum, it would seem best to me at least not cover them in the intro. As a field in an infobox I don't care. I would think that a phone call or two to the FRA organization might give help on finding out if the industry calls the MRMZ code a "reporting mark" or not, in order to get to an accepted label for the infobox field. I don't see the utility of setting up redirects and showing bolded MRM and MRMZ in the lede, as I don't imagine wikipedia readers are looking up this place by such a code and as I think it would be inappropriate for wikipedia editors to build in links to those codes, when they could link to the article name directly. Does this help? doncram (talk) 15:33, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

Quoting your comment above; "identifiers have also been created for non-rolling items like buildings", it would seem to me that you may be following the fallacy that "a Museum is a building". In the case of most Railway museums, the museum is a collection of railway equipment, along with land, tracks, buildings, and other artifacts, etc. The railway museums, when acquiring new rail equipment, need to ship this equipment over the US rail system, and as such, may need to apply their own reporting marks to this equipment, in order to identify it as belonging to them. However, due to the apparent lack of a proper, official, all-time listing of these codes, some small users of them, such as this museum, may not have a proper reference available to prove the existence of their codes. This situation is complicated by the fact that the issuing agency, the Association of American Railroads (AAR) apparently has never publicly published a full and complete listing of codes, (current or past), and has adopted a "MEMBERS ONLY" policy for most of its information. The best reference for current codes is a (AAR subsidiary) search engine, which only lists codes that have been utilized in the latest RFID tag electronic railcar identification system, which is highly unlikely to list antique and/or historic equipment on a 1 way trip to a happy retirement at its "final destination". The best listings of reporting marks available online have been put together by hobbyist organizations, and in addition to be admittedly incomplete (especially in the area of "non carriers" such as this museum), have generally been dismissed as being unreliable sources. WuhWuzDat 15:59, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

I understand better now, thanks for explaining. And the association of the MRMZ letters with this museum is established well enough for me by the FRA guide appendix, which lists this museum among railroad companies and other owners of rolling equipment. Thanks. doncram (talk) 16:35, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

You are most welcome. If you are interested, there is an ongoing discussion about this topic at Wikipedia:Content noticeboard#Reporting marks that can use some new input. It concerns this article, as well as the use of similar "codes" at Indiana Transportation Museum (ITMZ), and Illinois Railway Museum (IRYM) . WuhWuzDat 16:52, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

Additional resources

Monticello Gets Railcar - describes the loan of the passenger car City of Decatur by Illini Railroad Club to SPUR. Slambo (Speak) 16:26, 22 July 2018 (UTC)