Talk:Chepstow Railway Bridge

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Some assistance with formatting would be welcome. Peter Maggs

I'm having trouble with dashes - as has the previous edit. Help anyone? Peter Maggs

GA Re-Review and In-line citations

Members of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles are in the process of doing a re-review of current Good Article listings to ensure compliance with the standards of the Good Article Criteria. (Discussion of the changes and re-review can be found here). A significant change to the GA criteria is the mandatory use of some sort of in-line citation (In accordance to WP:CITE) to be used in order for an article to pass the verification and reference criteria. Currently this article does not include in-line citations. It is recommended that the article's editors take a look at the inclusion of in-line citations as well as how the article stacks up against the rest of the Good Article criteria. GA reviewers will give you at least a week's time from the date of this notice to work on the in-line citations before doing a full re-review and deciding if the article still merits being considered a Good Article or would need to be de-listed. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us on the Good Article project talk page or you may contact me personally. On behalf of the Good Articles Project, I want to thank you for all the time and effort that you have put into working on this article and improving the overall quality of the Wikipedia project. LuciferMorgan 00:36, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Good Article Review

This article is currently under Good Article Review. LuciferMorgan 21:11, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Removed

Review the comments leading to this consensus here. Article may be re-submitted in the future once the issues left by reviewers are sorted. Nja247 (talk • contribs) 13:37, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Improving the flow

I think the article has a lot of useful detail, but maybe it needs to have the logical flow imrpoved. I think it needs to start with something like geography, timeline, site difficulty, technical solution, why adopted, shortcomings, subsequent developments elsewhere.

I think some of the detail, e.g. the boys who set fire to Conw(a)y bridge, while true, detract from the authority of this page.

I'm not sure that there are many other references that can be cited, but it needs to be attempted. If no-one has any adverse comments, I'll have a shot at this shortly

Afterbrunel 20:24, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Haven't looked at the whole flow, sorry, but you could easily lose the 2nd para of the 'epilogue'. (Just check that the details are also contained in the appropriate articles...) As for references, I'm sure there are more around. I've been working on Wharncliffe Viaduct (also Brunel) and I've been surprised how many refs we could find.

EdJogg 23:23, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Times to London

There's a claim in the article (end of background section) that the bridge reduced journey times between London and Swansea. I'm not certain if this was ever true (it may still have been quicker to use the Aust ferry and the train from Bristol, rather than travel via Gloucester) but there's a literal claim "reducing the journey time [...] from 15 hours, by road and ferry, to 5 hours by rail". I find this incredible.

Journey times today are 3 hours for Swansea to London, using the Severn tunnel, and 4 1/2 hours via Gloucester.

So I find the claim of a journey time in 1852 only half an hour longer than today to be incredible. Also the "15 hour" claim might be reasonable, but not a direct comparison. That's presumably the time for a purely road journey, not the rail, ferry and minimal road journey that could be made in 1852, merely avoiding the bridge. It's thus excessive to claim that the bridge itself reduced journey times by a factor of three. Andy Dingley (talk) 08:48, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, I'm just quoting the source in front of me now, the Chepstow Society leaflet of 1970, which reprints verbatim the Illustrated London News article of 1852, and that states:-

"To show the public utility of this great work, it may be mentioned that, two years ago, the journey from London to Swansea, partly by railway and partly by coach, crossing by a ferry-boat the dangerous passage of the Severn at Beachley, occupied fifteen hours. The express trains are now timed to perform the same distance (216 miles) with ease and comfort in five hours."

Sorry, but that seems pretty definitive to me. Ghmyrtle (talk) 08:55, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

PS: The article says ".. the new railway line, and bridge.." reduced the journey time - that is, the new line between Gloucester and Swansea which did not exist at all before 1850 - not just the bridge itself. Ghmyrtle (talk) 09:11, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

If that's a period ref, then I guess it's trustworthy. I presume they ran a through express train through Gloucester in those days, whereas now it's a change.

The point about the 15 hours is that a fairer comparison for the effects of the bridge alone would be train to Chepstow, then ferry and coach to Bristol and train again. I guess their 15 hours figure is based on coach from Swansea to Beachley, rather than train. It's a good comparison for the effect of building the line and bridge, rather than the bridge itself. Andy Dingley (talk) 09:31, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

That's what the article says ("..line and bridge.."), though if you'd rather use a verbatim quote from the ILN itself I don't mind. Ghmyrtle (talk) 09:42, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

In those days trains would have had to run via Gloucester, there being neither Severn Tunnel nor Bridge. Paddington to Swansea via Gloucester is indeed 216 miles (within a chain or so), so to do this in 5 hours represents an average speed of 43.2 mph, a bit stiff considering the climbs to Sapperton, Llanharan and Skewen and the necessity to change engines at Gloucester (the carriages would have run unchanged throughout, but the loco would not have done). Regular trains would have stopped more often: Reading, Swindon, Gloucester, Chepstow, Cardiff and Neath at the very least, which would make 5 hours somewhat optimistic. Perhaps 5 hours refers to the timing of the fastest (mail) trains? --Redrose64 (talk) 13:12, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

I've just found this:

With the bridge's completion for single track in 1852 ... Swansea could be reached in seven hours from London.

— Booker, Frank (1985) [1977]. The Great Western Railway: A New History (2nd ed.). Newton Abbot: David & Charles. p. 59. ISBN 0 946537 16 X.

This is 30.9 mph average, which is much more realistic. It seems that when the line to Haverfordwest opened (28 December 1853), the best trains of the day also ran at about 30 mph:

The final down train was the 9.15 am Paddington. Known as "The Express" it was due to arrive ... at 6 pm ... In the up direction the first train left at 9.10 am for Paddington, due at 6 pm, was also regarded as an express train with an average of some 30 mph over the 276 miles covered.

— Parker, Richard; Morris, John (2008) [1981]. The Railways of Pembrokeshire. Corhampton: Noodle Books. pp. 7–8. ISBN 978 1 906419 07 3.

--Redrose64 (talk) 13:52, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

I have no idea - one of the things I am not is a rail buff. But the 1852 source is as written above - if you want to qualify that in the article in some way, that's fine by me. Ghmyrtle (talk) 14:38, 17 April 2010 (UTC)