Ozsteamtrain

Hello, Ozsteamtrain, my name is Auroranorth. Welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like our encyclopedia and decide to stay. Thank you very much for creating a username, it's the first step to becoming a respected member of the community. Here are a couple of pages you might find useful. I won't go into great detail here, but if you ever need any help, you can always try Help:Contents. So, the pages:

• Wikipedia:Your first article - how to construct a great first article!
• Wikipedia:Cheatsheet - essential in learning about the different buttons you see when you click 'edit this page'.
• User:Ozsteamtrain/Sandbox - your very own sandbox where you can fiddle around with the buttons on 'edit this page'.
• My talk page - if you ever have any questions, edit that page and ask!

I hope you enjoy being a Wikipedian! Always remember to sign your name with the four tildes (~~~~) on any talk page (not in any article) - this will produce your name and date, similar to what will appear at the end of this message. Remember, if you need any help at all, check out Help:Contents, my talk page or the help desk. Or if you like, place {{helpme|YOURPROBLEMHERE}} on your talk page (this page) and someone will swing by soon. Once again, welcome, Ozsteamtrain!

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Thanks for the welcome, though I suspect it may have been automatically generated.

I have an interst in expanding the follwoing with a table of the 1946 trial results

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NYC_Niagara

But I have struggled to turn the excel document into a table hereon.

Anyone?

Ozsteamtrain 23:16, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Well, I suceeded!

Ozsteamtrain 13:34, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Good work :)

Speers Point

You're more than welcome to help at Speers Point, New South Wales, especially if you have taken any digital photographs - that's the biggest thing the article lacks at the moment. Orderinchaos 10:31, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Hi. I saw your note and would love it if you could email me. Auroranorth 05:51, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

Steam locomotive

Hi. I must admit I haven't proof-read your changes to Steam locomotive yet, but I've seen the size of the changes and it concerns me that the comprehensive coverage of superheating is rather too much for this article. Could I suggest that you move it to a new (sub-)article, with a summary in Steam locomotive? (Feel free to let me know when it's moved, and I'll gladly proof-read both parts.)

EdJogg (talk) 01:34, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Hello, just seen your post on EdJogg's page so have taken the liberty to drop you a word. You are right, these technical steam articles are pretty bad. For nearly a year now, I have been trying to sort out the mess on the Steam engine and Boiler articles which have turned into veritable Frankenstein monsters. At present I have three sandboxes on my talk page because I have so far tried to reorganise the articles into three bite-size chunks under a common "Steam power" heading. You are more than welcome to visit them: User:John of Paris/sandbox 5 Steam Power (overview); User:John of Paris/Sandbox1 Steam Power (boiler/steam generator).; User:John of Paris/sandbox 2 Steam Power (engine) but please remember they are still under construction. Although you will see that I am participating in a number of railway locomotive articles, I think it's a priority to sort out generalities first because not many people these days realise just how different any steam plant is from IC and tend to view steam in IC terms, in other words as just an alternative "engine", which it is not - it's an entirely different engineering philosophy in my view. This causes endless confusion, dialogues of the deaf and gives rise to the strangest of notions. The first to be left out in the cold are the younger generations; and I believe this to be the root cause of the vandalism rife in some steam articles (not the locomotive ones, they are ghettos that no outsiders ever venture into). Cheers,--John of Paris (talk) 10:23, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Hello again. Have closely read this very comprehensive essay and found one or two minor typos and of bits of wordiness that I can help with. Have you written anything else on the subject? I tend to agree with EdJogg that the section may now be bloated out of proportion to the rest of the article, but leave it as it is for now if only to wake a few people up! I also agree that it really needs its own separate article. I would like to send you a Word version of your text with one or two comments (unless you've got Pages by any chance). As you haven't given an e-mail address here, you can find one on my user page and drop me a word first if you wish.--John of Paris (talk) 13:18, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi all. Apologies, I have been elsewhere today. I have replied on my talk page, but the gist of it is that none of us have previously looked for or found superheater!! Any further action must be to merge the bulk of the steam loco subsection with the separate article, and provide a suitable summary and 'main' link. Then I must leave the details to you two, as I am a novice in such matters. I will offer proof-reading, as usual, although, as John knows, these can take a while to come to fruition!

EdJogg (talk) 02:23, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Nice to hear from you. References are always a bit of a problem in WP, mainly due to the NPOV and more especially the NOR policies. I can understand why they're there but they seem to me more applicable to social history, biographies and the like where opinions and attitudes vary wildly and are hard to keep in check - also references are generally easier to come by. However in technical or semi-technical articles of the sort that interest us very often the sources are as you say, hard to access or in many cases (popular history and the like) they are just factually wrong - and those are usually the ones most frequently cited. the very fact that you have to sift them out means you have to exercise judgement born of personal experience, that can only come from having a POV. In WP you quote your sources for two reasons: 1) to cover yourself (in which case it does not much matter whether the source is accessible or not), and 2) to help and support the reader (I think this is the only valid reason and that appears to be your view). The NOR policy especially often leads to some very dull articles cobbled together from various library scrapings because nobody wants to stick his neck out; in that respect I found your superheater contribution a real breath of fresh air. I'm glad you have referred me to the Steam Index page, not only for the sources on Schmidt (that you can give as a reference I think). I found the whole page interesting. I have got the Chacksfield book already, but the remarks needed to be made on the general perception of Fowler plus the references to his many papers and I had not noticed them before on the site. As for the Extreme Steam site, I have been visiting it for years now (it's a good thing he doesn't share the WP paranoia about image copyright).--John of Paris (talk) 13:41, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Oz, please don't worry if your references are obscure! I tend to work from mainly online references because they're easy, and my editing time is limited. However, I have a copy of The Slough Estates Railway -- a proper, bound, paper-printed book of which only 1000 copies were printed -- and I have every intention of mining it heavilly for appropriate references!!

If you can provide an absolute reference for your writings, then any seriously interested scholar should be able to find a copy at the British Library or the equivalent national establishments elsewhere. I would suggest you do not quote from references you do not have to hand -- there's no harm in including them as 'Further Reading', but without ready access you could easily introduce inaccuracies. As for the accuracy of your references, that is a tricky one, although if you have two conflicting references, that is surely an opening to a section covering misunderstandings, controversies and the like!

It is better if you have more than one reference, but if there was only one published work, what else could you use? I think the most important thing is that you have some references. That way you don't run the risk of being threatened with deletion!

Finally, and a bit off-topic... I'm sure that both of you would find yourselves at home at Train Spotting World. This is a fledgling wiki, based on similar lines to WP but without some of the restrictions, in particular 'NPOV' and 'NOR'. So you could both write as much as you like about steam engines! Please note that I am not trying to 'poach' you away from WP (you are most needed here!), just letting you know that this other site exists.

EdJogg (talk) 14:16, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

This is touched on above, but a user has pointed out again (here) that the "Superheating" section on Steam locomotive is far more comprehensive than the Superheater article itself, and I have suggested transferring most of it, leaving a {{main}} tag, to the main article. This is nearly all your work, so I've left the proposal outstanding until you've had a chance to look at it.--Old Moonraker (talk) 10:56, 31 December 2007 (UTC)