Talk:North Station

Deceptive traffic volume

The article says Of the eleven Amtrak stations in Massachusetts, North Station was the third busiest in FY2010, behind only South Station and Back Bay Station, boarding or detraining an average of approximately 1,150 passengers daily.[4] It is one of the twenty-five busiest stations in the Amtrak system. This is deceptive. This heavy traffic is due to the short distance commuter trips, it is not due to Amtrak usage out of this station. There is a single Amtrak itinerary leaving this station.Dogru144 (talk) 04:54, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Nope, they're correct as is. Those Amtrak passenger counts and rankings are explicitly due to Amtrak ridership only. 1150 daily is about 420,000 annually; I just updated to FY2012 numbers which is 1298 daily / 473,000 annual. Those are on the low end of the Amtrak Top 25 linked from the article. Commuter numbers are about 25,000 into North Station on weekdays, or in the 5-10 million range annually including weekend riders. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 06:01, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was no consensus. --BDD (talk) 23:07, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

• North Station → North Station (Boston)
• North Station (disambiguation) → North Station

– Boston is not the only town in the world with a station named North Station. Cecil Huber (talk) 21:58, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

• Oppose The North Station in Boston is the only one named just "North Station" on the disambiguation page. All others follow the format "[City] North station." See the difference? Hot Stop talk-contribs 00:30, 14 August 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment Yes, so? All the other ones already have disambiguating parts in their article names, so why shouldn't Boston North Station too? Cecil Huber (talk) 00:37, 14 August 2013 (UTC)
    • Because we don't invent names Hot Stop talk-contribs 21:58, 14 August 2013 (UTC)
      • Adding a disambiguating "(Boston)" after the name is not to invent a name. Cecil Huber (talk) 15:10, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
• Strong support - current title clearly fails WP:Article titles on WP:CRITERIA, as well as failing WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, WP:DISAMBIGUATION and WP:COMMONNAME. In ictu oculi (talk) 01:04, 14 August 2013 (UTC)
  • How so? No evidence given, WP:JUSTAPOLICY. oknazevad (talk) 13:35, 14 August 2013 (UTC)
    • No evidence given to the contrary either, Wikipedia:ASSERTN. Cecil Huber (talk) 15:20, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
      • I give very specific evidence re PRMARYTOPIC below. As for COMMONNAME, that guideline says "Wikipedia prefers the name that is most commonly used ..." "North Station is both the official name for the station as well as the name that is commonly used. --agr (talk) 15:29, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
        • I see that you make the argument, I can't see that you prove it. Cecil Huber (talk) 15:43, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
          • We are talking about evidence, not proof. Obviously this is a judgement call, but PRIMARYTOPIC suggests forms of evidence to consider and I gave them.--agr (talk) 16:11, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
• Strong Supprt per IIO -- 76.65.128.222 (talk) 02:20, 14 August 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose. North Station is probably the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, and we lack a proper naming guideline for US railway stations. Might support Boston North station. Mackensen (talk) 11:16, 14 August 2013 (UTC)
  • Except that the name of the station isn't "Boston North", its "North Station". oknazevad (talk) 13:35, 14 August 2013 (UTC)
    • Yes, but many other railway station article names are somewhat artificial. Mackensen (talk) 16:54, 14 August 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose This solves no real problem. When the article was named, it was the only "North Station" on WP. Concur with other reasons for opposition. Lentower (talk) 12:12, 14 August 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose Heck, there's no evidence that the other entries on the disambiguation page are even called "north station" other than an assertion. Plus there's a little thing called WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, and no evidence that this isn't just that. oknazevad (talk) 13:35, 14 August 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. The current title is the official name of the station in question. No other station with an article has this as its official name. A English language Google search produces mostly this station with other links largely to accidental pairings of the two words, not other railway stations. South Station averages over 120 hits a day, and North Station 80, which are high for relatively minor articles. Over 300 articles link to South Station, over 500 to North Station. These are all the tests WP:PRIMARYTOPIC suggests. There is no justification for disambiguation here.--agr (talk) 14:39, 14 August 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose, per oknazevad, agr and others. Let's not fix something that ain't broken. Hertz1888 (talk) 15:11, 14 August 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose, North Station is the only plain North Station on the list, all the others feature their city names in the title. For this reason, I don't see a need to move the page. WikiRedactor (talk) 17:29, 14 August 2013 (UTC)
  • Assuming that the Wikipedia article title is the only name a station goes by is a bad idea, indeed, frequently, many things have many names. If you live in one of those cities instead of Boston, would South Station mean Boston? -- 76.65.128.222 (talk) 21:26, 14 August 2013 (UTC)
    • Hot Stop talk-contribs 21:58, 14 August 2013 (UTC)
• Support, for surely people of other areas think of their local 'North Station' by that name alone. DeistCosmos (talk) 19:30, 14 August 2013 (UTC)
  • Hot Stop talk-contribs 21:58, 14 August 2013 (UTC)
• Support, but this time with some evidence. First, let me say that this is an "inherently ambiguous" construct, which would benefit some "preemptive disambiguation" even if it were the only "North Station" on the planet. But of course, it isn't. We have articles:
  • Brussels-North railway station
  • Beijing North Railway Station
  • Estació del Nord, Valencia, starting with "The North Station is the main station in Valencia"
  • Bucharest North railway station
  • Hyde North railway station
  • Shenyang North Railway Station
  • Stockholm North Station
  • Stuttgart North station
  • Guangzhou North Railway Station
  • Gare du Nord...

  most of the above are major stations in major cities. I'm not sure where the cityname is a part of the common name, and where it is just a natural disambiguautor, but the Boston one cannot just claim WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. Google search for "North station" does put a few Boston hits on the top, but it becomes a mixed bag very soon afterwards. No such user (talk) 11:18, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

• Support as inherently ambiguous and per No such user. Searches on google.co.uk, google.com.au and google.co.nz do not show any hits for any station in Boston other than this Wikipedia article and never in first place. It is not the global primary topic. Thryduulf (talk) 13:06, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

There is nothing in WP:PRIMARYTOPIC that suggests we need search local editions of Google. And the word "global" does not appear in PRIMARYTOPIC, nor in the entire disambiguation guideline. The goal of disambiguation is to insure articles have unique titles in the en.Wikipedia article name space, not to enable every English-speaking person on the planet to immediately know what the subject of an article is just from the title. --agr (talk) 18:39, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

• Comment: The obvious place for a DAB page (North station—note the small “s”) currently doesn't exist. Useddenim (talk) 21:08, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment Interesting. I hadn't even thought about that. When searching for "north station" you get here to "North Station" as it is now. Cecil Huber (talk) 15:14, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
    • Maybe a good solution would be to just move North Station (disambiguation) to North station. I'd list the Boston station first on the disambiguation page as it is the only one that matches the search term "north station" exactly, but that is a quibble.--agr (talk) 16:22, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Interstate versus intercity

@Morganfitzp and Prosfilaes: Can you explain why you have changed "intercity" to "interstate"? I believe that noting intercity service (for which the Downeaster was the first since the 1965 discontinuances of the remaining Portland, Laconia, and White River Junction trains) - as a distinct type of service from commuter rail, which has been continually in operation - is more significant than whether service crosses state lines. Some North Station-based commuter service has crossed state lines (notably the 1967-discontinued Concord and Dover trips, and the 1980-81 Concord trip) but that was decidedly commuter rail rather than intercity rail. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 18:38, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

I think there's just some confusion over what the terms mean. "Interstate" in this context just means 'connecting one state with another state', but "intercity" doesn't just mean 'connecting one city with another'. It sounds silly to say that the Downeaster was the first "inter-city" service since 1965, since North Station has always had service between cities, connecting Boston with, e.g., Lynn, Salem, Beverly, Lawrence, Lowell, Cambridge, Medford, etc.... if you don't realize that "intercity" rail service means something more specific than that. AJD (talk) 19:46, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

"intercity" means between cities. Its user otherwise is a bit jargony, and you had no link in the article. I suppose I wouldn't have much of a problem with calling it inter-city rail, no |, which is more clear that it is specific jargon.--Prosfilaes (talk) 08:49, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the question. Most MBTA trains are "intercity" trains. For example, the train that runs west from the city of Boston stops at the city of Framingham before arriving at the city of Worcester and is hence an intercity train. I seem to recall that the previous use of "intercity" claimed that Amtrak's Downeaster returned intercity service to North Station, but intercity service was still in place as trains serviced cities in Mass, such as Lowell and Fitchburg. While the Downeaster restored service to the cities of Dover and Portland, it did not restore intercity service in general. But it did restore service to the states of New Hanpshire and Maine, hence restoring "interstate" service from North Station. Morganfitzp (talk) 18:01, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

Also, I look forward to the day when this article can be edited to say that a train restored "international" service from North Station to the cities of Halifax, Montreal and others located in the Canadian provinces. Morganfitzp (talk) 18:01, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

MBTA service to Lowell, Worcester, and Fitchburg is not intercity service merely because they are cities. It is commuter rail service with numerous local stops, primarily oriented around short-distance travel in the Boston metropolitan, operated under the brand "MBTA Commuter Rail". Intercity rail, as discussed in the article I linked, is characterized by longer journeys (only the outer fringes of the MBTA system even hit 30 miles) and limited stops (all MBTA services make local stops on all or part of their routes, with station-to-station distances on the order of 1-5 miles). Pi.1415926535 (talk) 18:28, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

Exactly. The term "intercity rail" has a specific meaning as a term of art, and indicates travel from one principle city to another, not between a principle with and it's suburban headroom communities. That's a bit of pedantry that does not fit with the accepted use of the term. The correct term, the one hat is the title of the article on the class of the rail service, should be used. oknazevad (talk) 18:33, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

@Prosfilaes: Please stop reverting and actually read the intercity rail and commuter rail articles. Edit summaries like "all of commuter rails run between cities" indicate that you do not understand the difference between the two types of railroad service and are simply being stubborn. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 04:43, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

This is not RailWiki; this is a general encyclopedia. You can not assume that all readers have read intercity rail and commuter rail. As I said above, and you never bothered responding to, intercity rail might be sufficient to make it clear that we aren't using the word wikt:intercity in its normal English meaning. Just using intercity is not good enough.--Prosfilaes (talk) 04:52, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

It's not pedantry; it's speaking to your audience. I read "intercity" and saw vandalism, because I'm not part of the small community that uses that "term of art".

As a note, replying on the talk page on a question like this after two weeks and editing the article page within 15 minutes make it very hard to have a calm discussion.--Prosfilaes (talk) 04:47, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

Your claim that "intercity" is jargon or not accessible to a general audience - especially with a wikilink - is not supported by any evidence. "Intercity rail" is vastly more common than "interstate rail", and has been since the 1970s. What evidence can you offer that "interstate" is more common or more likely to be understood, other than your personal opinion?

So reverting to what I believe is a more common and correct term per my post weeks ago, and adding a wikilink for clarification, is vandalism? And you have your order of events wrong - I did not change to "intercity" today until reverting you a moment ago, hours after I posted on the talk page (in response to another editor). Pi.1415926535 (talk) 04:57, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

Also, your wiktionary link makes my point exactly: intercity means city-to-city or city-to-city-to-city-to-city, not city-to-town-to-town-to-village-to-town-to-village-to-city nor city-to-suburb-to-suburb. MBTA Commuter Rail service is the latter; the only person calling it intercity is you. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 05:01, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

This edit had me confused; the only reason I took the time to write an edit message instead of just simply rolling it back as vandalism is because I recognized you as a good editor. Then after this discussion and I posted on the 25th of September, at 18:33, 7 October 2019 "intercity" was restored and someone bothered to reply on this talk page. It may not have been you, but it was still very frustrating.

You didn't write "intercity rail"; you wrote "intercity service". Ngrams finds neither intercity service or interstate service. If we go intercity, interstate, interstate clearly wins, even if we eliminate the Interstate Highway system.

Look at the Google Books search for intercity. They're a collection of governmental works by transportation boards, works by Springer-Verlag in expensive, highly technical academic series, plus a few works that someone going for a undergraduate degree in a related field might read. At no point does "Travel New England in 60 Days!" or any other work your local Barnes and Noble might carry show up on that list. I think that's pretty good proof that "intercity" is going to be understood, at best, as "inter-" + "city".

You admitted above that Lowell is a city. Going the other direction, Providence, RI is certainly a city, and they're both larger than anything north of the MA-NH border.

Fine, intercity is the technical term. That does not mean that it's a term that's well understood by the general public. As far as I can tell, Amtrak doesn't use it on their website, and a websearch turns up Wikipedia and government entities distant from the average person. If it's going to be used here, let's be maximally clear it's a term of art and doesn't mean the same thing as most readers would assume.--Prosfilaes (talk) 02:36, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

The issue was your use of quotation marks in the search. intercity service versus interstate service is a wash ("Interstate Service" appears to be a common auto services name), but intercity rail service versus interstate rail service is clear.

Amtrak's corporate profile and service plan and press releases use "intercity rail" and variations like "intercity passenger rail" extensively, as does the most recent significant legislation and the FRA profile. The second page of the Massachusetts state rail plan explicitly differentiates between MBTA commuter rail service and Amtrak intercity service. All (save of course for the legislation) are written for general audiences and not specifically technical folks.

You have still failed to provide any evidence that "interstate" is remotely common in relation to rail service, much less that it would be more understood in this context. The fact that "intercity" is the correct term for rail service does not make it inaccessibly technical nor likely to be misunderstood by our readers. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 04:12, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

When I read "Continuing its FY18 success", I don't think "general audiences"; that's technical jargon. Amtrak doesn't describe what it does as "intercity" until you get down to that corporate profile page. Again, I showed you the link to Google Books, where not a single book would be sold in a Barnes and Noble. There's not a single travel book on that list that mentioned "intercity rail"; it was all government documents and textbooks too intimidating if you were merely going for a Bachelor's in that subject. Okay, there was one or two books that might be accessible if you were going for a Bachelor's in that subject, but nothing for a general audience. Zero "Lonely Planet", "Visit Germany", "Travelling China" volumes. Certainly no "Murder in Dozens" or "Babysitter's Club".

It is not likely to be misunderstood by our readers? That is demonstrably false. Morganfitzp and I clearly failed to understand it; as I said, when I saw your first edit, it looked so absurd as to be vandalism. If what you want to talk about is inter-city rail, then why not say "inter-city rail (as opposed to commuter rail)", which makes it entirely clear what you mean and what a reader needs to do to figure out exactly what inter-city rail is?--Prosfilaes (talk) 07:21, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

Four days later, and I must assume that I have consensus, because nobody can be bothered to respond for four days. Changing the article appropriately.--Prosfilaes (talk) 11:52, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

No, when no other editor agrees with you and all editors have decided to disengage with your badgering the discussion and inability to listen to what they are saying, then you don't have consensus. Let me ask you this, by analogy. Metro-North, NJ Transit, SEPTA, and others all have lines that extend into adjacent states, but no one classifies them as anything other than commuter rail because that's the type of service they provide. It's not the existence of state lines that change the category, it's the class of service, and inter-city rail is a separate class from commuter rail. I don't understand why you can't seem to comprehend that this article is discussing that distinction. oknazevad (talk) 12:09, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

User:Morganfitzp agreed with me; have you even read this talk page? I see you didn't even look at my latest change to this article. I don't understand why you can't seem to comprehend that writing the article in a way that verifiably confuses readers of the article is a problem.--Prosfilaes (talk) 13:20, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

I don't see any verifiable proof that anyone other than you is confused. Morganfitzp hasn't made any reverts since the discussion started, and seems to be satisfied with the explanation. Only you keep editing against consensus here. oknazevad (talk) 20:41, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

My my. Had I known that this would create such a heated hubbub, I would have let pass any semantic differences between "intercity" and "interstate." My personal hope is that we might free up traffic on interstates by re-investing in intercity rail, so perhaps my biggest gaff was a subconscious NPOV violation by swapping the debated terms and causing my fellow editors to lose precious sleep. I hereby recuse myself from the World Wide Web (which does encompass both intercity and interstate networks). Morganfitzp (talk) 12:01, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

Adding former service

63.135.6.222 (talk) 03:41, 14 April 2021 (UTC)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gull It served North Station, yet is not listed under "Former Service".

Information on The Gull and other traffic was there, but this was deleted without proper reason. There is apparent bias in the article towards architectural emphasis and towards deletion of the historical significance of the station. Here is an important revelation: the purpose of the station was to serve people traveling (passenger train traffic). The station was made large and ostentatious years prior to the middle of the 20th century because of the large volume of passenger traffic, including to locales in different states and Canadian provinces. The B&M would not have invested in the architectural marvels of the station, had not the station had the passenger train importance that it had.Dogru144 (talk) 18:15, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

All of the information was still on Wikipedia: I simply moved it to its proper location at Boston and Maine Railroad#Boston trains and linked it from this article. The full listing of B&M intercity service, including details like train numbers and partner railroads, belongs on the B&M article. (It also needs to be accurate - the table that you re-added to this article has several errors.) Most of that information is not relevant to North Station itself, regardless of its importance as a passenger station. I can add an additional paragraph (not a table) summarizing the major trains, the major final destinations, and discontinuance years. Summarizing is the key word; the following sentences will replace half the table: Most through service to Bangor, Maine (operated by the Maine Central Railroad past Portland) ended in 1958. The final through services operated to Canada ended soon after – the Red Wing to Montreal in 1959, and the Gull to Halifax in 1960 – leaving only local B&M service plus intercity trains to Laconia and Portland. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 20:11, 24 February 2022 (UTC)