Talk:Malbone Street wreck

Deadly crash

It was the most deadly rapid transit railroad wreck in world history, until the Amagasaki rail crash in Japan on 2005-04-25.

This is incorrect. If the Amagasaki rail crash (107 killed) is also considered rapid transit, then so should the Yokohama rail crash in 1963 be, where 161 people were killed. They were the same types of trains (commuter trains). I shall remove this sentence. -- KittySaturn 14:49, 2005 May 28 (UTC)

Recent additions

An editor added the following unsourced information, which I have reverted given the lack of a source. Marc Shepherd 21:52, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

December 1st, 1974

On December 1st, 1974 a train of R32's were running on ther present day Franklin SHuttle. The lead car failed to negtiotate a switch and train hit the same spot as the 1918 wreck. Car 3669 was damaged and could not be repaired. Service was suspended for a few hours, and single-track operation was run at night. Service was fully restored the next day.

This is backed up by http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=796509, though not in as much detail. Zenyu 03:58, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

If you look at the picture of the track's on the 'forgotten ny' page (in external links) you can see that the switch is just before the S curve, so while the train may have hit the same tunnel walls, the cause was probably different (motorman inexperience in 1918, deferred maintenance in 1974). Zenyu 14:44, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

2005

Last year a 2 car set of R68's crashed into the wall close to the 2 previous 2 accidents. No one was injured or killed.

Speed of Train

On 31 July 2006, user 64.115.206.253 edited the page changing the stated speed of the train from "an estimated 30-40 mph" to 70mph (a barely believable figure which probably far exceeds what these trains were capable of). Other webpages on this topic agree with the original figure of 30-40. I have therefore reverted these changes. TomH 20:21, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, a sensible reversion. Marc Shepherd 21:07, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

FYI, the 70 mph figure is mentioned in this contemporary New York Times article. It's presented without qualification in the headline, but the body of the article makes it clear that it's just a claim made by "a naval officer who was a passenger". (The squeamish beware: the description of the accident in that article is gruesome.) —Eric S. Smith 13:50, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Discussion paragraph

Even if every crash relies on a " series of individual circumstances" the paragraph highlights as "circumstance" the BLE strike: it is a gross misleading & quite slanderous statement,a strike is not an error or dangerous act like the unaccettable decision to engage an unskilled motorman.--Kiko 64 (talk) 17:32, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

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Exact Type of Rolling Stock Involved?

Does anyome know Exact Type of Rolling Stock Involved? And eventual fate of the carriages? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2604:2000:14C5:8206:219:E3FF:FED3:9BF8 (talk) 07:11, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Requested move 15 January 2020

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Moved  — Amakuru (talk) 09:11, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

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Malbone Street Wreck → Malbone Street wreck – Undiscussed move based on claim of proper name; sources mostly lowercase. Dicklyon (talk) 04:42, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

This is a contested technical request (permalink). Anthony Appleyard (talk) 22:55, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

• @Dicklyon and Station1: queried move request Anthony Appleyard (talk) 22:57, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
• [Moved from "Requests to revert undiscussed moves"] This article has always been at Malbone Street Wreck except for 2 hours last May when it was moved to lower case and then quickly reverted. Requires discussion. Station1 (talk) 08:04, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
• Support move. I don't see any indication that wreck should be capitalized. A spot check of sources doesn't look favorable for keeping it capitalized, either. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 23:49, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose as currently structured. Sources like the Smithsonian, Post, NY Transit Museum and the contemporary NY Times articles refer to it with uppercase "Wreck". The uppercase "Wreck" may refer to a proper name and is acceptable, per WP:COMMONNAME. But the lowercase "wreck" is completely subjective and not a neutral name. If we are seeking a lowercase title, "wreck" is not the correct word to use, as it's a sensational word that we should avoid using.

I'm saying "Oppose as currently structured" because a more descriptive and objective title like "derailment", "accident", "train collision" etc. would be preferred if the word "wreck" was a common noun rather than a proper noun, e.g. Malbone Street derailment. The title "derailment" is not used in many sources, though, and "wreck" as a lowercase word is ambiguous and non-neutral. epicgenius (talk) 21:37, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

@Dicklyon: Also, for the sake of transparency, I would like to know which "mostly lowercase" sources you are referring to. I think the recent NY Times article is the only source which uses lowercase "wreck". I have also found this source, but in all the other sources I have looked at, "Malbone Street Wreck" is uppercase. epicgenius (talk) 01:13, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

I mostly look at books, since web sources over-capitalize a lot and copy from Wikipedia a lot. See books: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6] are some of the many. Dicklyon (talk) 02:39, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

And this Smithsonian source that you linked uses lowercase wreck; and this NY Transit Museum source that you linked also uses lowercase wreck, though not consistently. Don't be misled by headlines. You need to look at whether they treat it as a proper name in the text. Dicklyon (talk) 02:44, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. Though I'm still of the opinion that another title needs to be found, I can see your point. epicgenius (talk) 13:58, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

• Support. Dicklyon, that list of sources is pretty good. Epic, please note that a lot of statistical evidence is contaminated by drawing on titles, which often use title case. Downcasing "wreck" is consistent with the way WP's articles are treated, in particular by our style guides. Tony (talk) 05:44, 17 January 2020 (UTC)
  • @Dicklyon and Tony1: If you want to go with a lowercase descriptor, fine. But "wreck" is an ambiguous, sensationalized word that should be replaced by a more specific term. if it's lowercase. That is why I am not changing my oppose. epicgenius (talk) 13:53, 17 January 2020 (UTC)
    • • Downcasing does not affect the ambiguity, if there is ambiguity. Tony (talk) 23:18, 17 January 2020 (UTC)
    • How is it ambiguous? Whether you consider it PoV-laden or not is probably not relevant; we use the WP:COMMONNAME even it is isn't neutral. See WP:POVNAME policy: "Sometimes [the most] common name includes non-neutral words that Wikipedia normally avoids .... In such cases, the prevalence of the name ... generally overrides concern that Wikipedia might appear as endorsing one side of an issue. And there isn't even "an issue" to "side" with here; you just don't like the word. I don't really buy the PoV argument about wreck, anyway. While I concede that in some narrow dialectal circumstance it might subjectively have some kind of "baggage", in general American English (and this is an AmEng topic), it's just a normal everyday usage, a synonym of crash and a less obtuse way of saying collision. The genuinely PoV term would be accident, which implies that no one is really at fault, that it "just happened" like an act of God. That's why police, insurance agents, lawyers, judges, etc. – and careful journalists – are trained to avoid that term. In the search results near bottom of my analysis below, accident usages are infrequent, and if you dig them out of the original search results, they're mostly in low-end news sites, not major, reputable publishers (who, on the other hand, seem to have no issue with the word "wreck"). There can also be other more-PoV-than-wreck ones, like tragedy and disaster, but they're not common in the sources. PS: It's also a little weird to me to argue that "wreck" is somehow too PoV for the worst train disaster in NY history and one of the worst in the US, with ~100 killed. That's a wreck by surely any meaning.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:41, 17 January 2020 (UTC)
      • @SMcCandlish: Wreck can mean any number of things. It can mean a derailment, collision, or even a car accident. If we use WP:COMMONNAME we should use the uppercase as it is a proper name. If not, we use a more descriptive lowercase, e.g. 1995 Williamsburg Bridge subway crash, December 2013 Spuyten Duyvil derailment. I will not be commenting any more on this matter. epicgenius (talk) 16:10, 17 January 2020 (UTC)
        • We generally choose title words based on what it's called in sources. Is anything but "wreck" common for this one? No response is needed unless someone comes up with an affirmative answer. Dicklyon (talk) 16:31, 17 January 2020 (UTC)
        • And "Wreck can mean any number of things" doesn't matter if there is no other notable Malbone Street wreck about which we have or might have an article. Just imagine the million+ pedantic and un-concise page renames we'd have to do if we had to try to prefigure every "imaginable" or "possible" ambiguity. WP only cares about ones that relate directly to extant or probable article titles (and likely reader search strings stabbing at them), or which are just innately badly confusing (e.g. Norwegian Forest cat, which without "cat" would almost certainly be interpreted by most readers as a woodland).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:07, 17 January 2020 (UTC)
• Support per innumerable previous RMs on descriptive phrases like this, i.e. per MOS:CAPS and WP:NCCAPS: WP does not capitalize things that are not near-uniformly capitalized in independent, reliable sources. It amazes me that we keep having to say this again and again, month after month, year after year, with the same results. WP:RM/TR should probably just be amended to make moves like this explicitly speediable, with the burden of proof to challenge or revert it laying firmly on the shoulders of those who would deny that these guidelines are somehow applicable to their "magically special" case. I have no objection in theory to Epicgenius's suggestion to use something like "Malbone Street derailment" or "Malbone Street collision", but only if a WP:COMMONNAME analysis supports it statistically, which I doubt, especially after having looked into it (see search results below, in which news text uses "crash" more often than any other term, whether in the exact construction Malbone Street [something] or in some other phrasing structure.

  Anyway, DickLyon is correct that Epicgenius is obviously commingling title-case headlines with running-text usage. Just a few minutes with such searches, performed and inspected properly, will demonstrate that sources not only do not usually treat this as a proper name (nor capitalize "wreck" or a similar term in any alternative word order), they do not in fact consistently use any particular phrase; this is just one of numerous such descriptions (potential WP:NTITLEs), and seems to be the most common one. I agree with DickLyon that book sources are by far the most relevant for something like this, since it is nowhere near news, being from 1918. The modern news reporting that is returned by Google News, etc., is mostly about (or a followup to) an anniversary commemoration, which arguably could be a proper name (being possibly an organized thing – except the sources don't seem to consistently name it either). Many of the e-news sources that capitalize "Wreck" (and other terms like "Crash") are demonstrably not following anything like Wikipedia style nor even common news style, but amateurishly capitalizing without any regard for English writing norms of any codified kind anywhere: "Never Forget: 101 Years After The Worst Subway Crash in ...", "NYC Honors The 101st Anniversary Of Deadliest Subway ...", "A Century Ago, NYC Didn't Even Have An L Train To Complain About", etc. (emphasis added). I challenge anyone to find any English-language style guide, ever, that permits such rampant over-capitalization. It's a completely aberrant style and therefore of zero use for any kind of "WP should capitalize because sources do" claim.

  And sources just do not use "Malbone Street Wreck" with anything approaching consistency, even if you only look at online news sources. Here is a wide-net search to find a large proportion of the relevant articles that mention the crash at all (with or without mentioning the anniversary memorial), and the styles are just all over the map, with an actual minority of them capitalizing in running text. [7]. Just from page 1 of the results, using body copy not headlines: "the Malbone wreck", "the Malbone Street subway accident", "the Malbone Street wreck of 1918", "the Malbone Street wreck of November 1, 1918", "the 1918 Malbone Street wreck in the New York City subway system", "the Malbone Street disaster", "the derailment and crash of a train at the Malbone Street (later Empire Boulevard) station" (no name-like appellation is applied to it at all), "derailing near a tunnel under Malbone Street ... the wreck ..." (ditto), "The worst subway accident in the city’s history ... a conductor who was filling in for a striking employee lost control ... on Brooklyn’s Malbone Street. The resulting crash ..." (ditto), "a passenger train derailed in tunnel underneath Malbone Street .... The accident ..." (ditto), "Malbone Street (now Empire Boulevard, its name changed following a horrific subway crash) ..." (ditto), "At least 90 are killed when a Brighton Beach Train of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company derails inside the Malbone Street tunnel" (ditto). So, 12 of the 22 top results do not use "Malbone Street Wreck" or "Malbone Street [Capitalized Anything Else]", except in title-case headlines/headings.

  To sew this up, the majority of those that do capitalize in mid-sentence are not major news sites, but random newsy blogs of low reputability, and many of them link directly to the Wikipedia article, i.e. they obviously copy-pasted the capitalization directly from us. This by itself is a good reason WP should be "religious" about avoiding over-capitalization and other abuses of style or wording; it has a real effect on the real world (it degrades the quality of semi-pro, poorly edited writing and degrades the English-language skills of readers of such material, i.e. just about everyone with a smartphone), as well as WP:CIRCULAR-interfering with our own ability to assess the real-world consensus without WP's own interference. PS: see also WP:GOOGLE and all the caveats in there against just accepting the superficial results of simple searches. Using search engines for analyses like this requires getting into the material behind the results summaries, and being aware of what can affect the returns in the first place.
   — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:41, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

• Support as nom – I recognize that my claim at WP:RMTR that the caps were from an "Undiscussed move based on claim of proper name" was somewhat inaccurate. The real rationale is just that it's not a proper name, per the criteria at MOS:CAPS, so per WP:NCCAPS we shouldn't cap the general part. I cited a string of sources using the lowercase in the discussion above, and showed that epicgenius was misreading most of the ones he cited as supporting caps. No-brainer, as Tony likes to say. Dicklyon (talk) 00:29, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

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