Talk:NZR RM class (Midland)

Trains: in New Zealand / Locomotives Low‑importance

	Trains Portal
Sel	week 46, 2020

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Trains, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to rail transport on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion. See also: WikiProject Trains to do list and the Trains Portal.TrainsWikipedia:WikiProject TrainsTemplate:WikiProject Trainsrail transport articles

Low

This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Associated projects or task forces:
/
	This article is supported by WikiProject New Zealand Railways (assessed as Low-importance).
	This article is supported by the Locomotives task force.

New Zealand Start‑class Low‑importance

	New Zealand portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject New Zealand, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of New Zealand and New Zealand-related topics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.New ZealandWikipedia:WikiProject New ZealandTemplate:WikiProject New ZealandNew Zealand articles
Start	This article has been given a rating which conflicts with the project-independent quality rating in the banner shell. Please resolve this conflict if possible.
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Brands

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Brands, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of brands on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.BrandsWikipedia:WikiProject BrandsTemplate:WikiProject BrandsBrands articles
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

We would like to add a photo. But all the photos we know of are still within copyright, and the railcar has not been preserved so we can't take our own to show on this article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Vogel Era (talk • contribs) 08:43, 18 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Railcar vs rail-car, vs. rail cas vs rail motor vs rail-motor vs railmotor

Looking through contemporaneous newspaper listings at this archive, I can see little support for the idea that "rail motor" was unused and that the vehicles were always referred to as railcars both in service and in all published literature. Railmotor and its variants appear to be seen as an old-fashioned usage as time goes by, but the ratio of cites is about one-to-two. Anmccaff (talk) 14:45, 3 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The question is what name was given to the vehicles by NZR, by the newspapers of the day, and by the general public when the vehicles were in service. The main terms initially were "rail-car" and railcar", before the literature settled on the non-hyphenated "railcar". I consider "rail-car" and "railcar" to be essentially identical, just typological convention that took a while to settle. In support of "railcar" we have:

articles on the proposed new types of vehicles in NZ Railways Magazine in 1935 and 36
many articles in newspapers in 1935 and 36 on the new types of vehicles proposed or in development
statements by the general manager of NZR before similar cars were built, when they were doing promotional tours, when they were in service, and when writers were looking back at that general manager's career.
articles in newspapers quoting statements by NZR engineers.
many articles in newspapers announcing the new railcar service.
term used in NZR working timetable for the service provided by RM 20 and 21 (unpublished, unfortunately)
all articles in newspapers describing events that happened to the railcars.
article in NZ Railways Staff Bulletin in 1955.
term used in all reviews of railcar development in NZ published 1940s-present day.

As may be appreciated, I have spent many hours in libraries (Wellington library and National Library of NZ) and archives (NZRLS and Alexander Turnbull Library - mostly an unpublished archive) to accumulate this overall picture.

In support of "rail motor" or "rail-motor" we have:

Captions in some photographs in the ATL that use the term (most photo captions use "rail-car/railcar")
A few newspaper articles around the time of introduction that use the term (perhaps quoting NZR staff involved in construction)

Overall, I have found "rail-motor" to be confined to very few items. For the Wikipedia Article, I consider there is no merit in using "rail-motor" ahead of "railcar". Vogel Era (talk) 06:26, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Beginning of service

The start of revenue service has been changed, using a cite which does not detail this. Anmccaff (talk) 15:02, 3 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The reference (No 9 currently) indicates the start of revenue service for RM20 by the date of the paper issue. There was a lot of advertising that the railcar would start service on Monday 3 August, both in The Press (the paper subsidising the service) and in other papers (I cite two Press articles (Nos 10 and 11 currently) in support of this). Then, in the Press article of Wednesday 5 August is says that the car ran for the first time "today." The "today", of course is the 5th. NZ Parliamentary records (published) that I have seen cited (in published literature), also give a date of 5 August for revenue service beginning. (I haven't located any reason for the delay in published or unpublished literature.) I considered that three references was adequate support for this detail. Vogel Era (talk) 05:59, 8 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified (February 2018)

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on NZR RM class (Midland). Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20110807032457/http://railcar.netfirms.com/railcar_series/early.htm to http://railcar.netfirms.com/railcar_series/early.htm

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 02:52, 11 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]