Talk:Railway and tramway terminology in Europe

This article was nominated for deletion on 21 July 2017. The result of the discussion was no consensus.

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The article's purpose

There is a significant difference between the railway terminology between British English (and by extension UIC terminology and the terminology of other European languages) and American English. This is excarberated by the commonsense fact that Europe developed tram technology way more than North America, and thus tram terminology is largely a product of Europe. Thanks to this, there is a significant confusion regarding these terms both inside and outside Wikipedia. I'm not aware of any reliable source addressing this confusion of "worldwide" terminology in what we call the "Western world", where railway technology is more advanced then almost all of the other parts of the world. Since this article is more akin to a comparative glossary of terms, it can be argued that no reliable citations can be given. Perhaps the article would be a better fit for Wiktionary as an appendix, or as a project page here on Wikipedia to aid writing articles, but I believe it could be a useful resource at least to editors.

To illustrate the terminology disrepancies that the article tries to shine light on, the terms "multiple unit" (a generally North American term) and "motorcoach" (a generally European term, with words in different languages), are often taken as synonyms by editors who are knowledgeable about railways in the US, however a "motorcoach" is not necessarily a "multiple unit", as can be seen by the numerous tram systems of Europe, where single powered tramcars can't and won't control or power another unit of their type, which is the definition of a "multiple unit". This kind of terminology disrepancy plagues a large percentage of the railway and tramway articles on the English-language Wikipedia.

The choice of language in the tables tried to account for the more significant European countries in the era where large scale railway electrification and electric tramway construction was made. Of course, the selected language could be changed according to more rigid and scientific criteria. --Rev L. Snowfox (talk) 09:28, 21 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]