Great Britain Railway Reference (compendium of Wikipedia articles)

[telstarbox]

Wikipedia has a function for compiling multiple articles in a 'book' which can be read offline in PDF and other formats on a computer or e-book reader. I've had a go at compiling some of the most useful reference articles relating to the British network as I thought it may be useful for folk on here to have a copy, especially if on a train without access to the web.

If anyone finds this useful or has suggestions for other articles please let me know as the book contents can be expanded or changed.

The articles are of course from Wikipedia so apply usual precautions and don't use for anything life-dependent!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Great_Britain_Railway_Reference

(click 'Download PDF' - file is 62 MB)

 

[Muzer]

I was going to try doing this for every railway station's article - it would certainly require writing a bot though, it's too mammoth a task to attempt alone

 

[telstarbox]

I think that would be fairly easy to do. I've done one for the first few stations, it's easy enough to do the whole lot. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Stations_Test

Here's the 'source code' for my Book:

{{saved book
 |title=NR Stations Book Test
 |subtitle=Abbey Wood to Acocks Green
 |cover-image=Abbey_Wood_station_-_geograph.org.uk_-_141798.jpg
 |cover-color=}}

== Great Britain Railway Reference ==
;Stations
:[[Abbey Wood railway station]]
:[[Aber railway station]]
:[[Abercynon railway station]]
:[[Aberdare railway station]]
:[[Aberdeen railway station]]
:[[Aberdour railway station]]
:[[Aberdovey railway station]]
:[[Abererch railway station]]
:[[Abergavenny railway station]]
:[[Abergele & Pensarn railway station]]
:[[Aberystwyth railway station]]
:[[Accrington railway station]]
:[[Achanalt railway station]]
:[[Achnasheen railway station]]
:[[Achnashellach railway station]]
:[[Acklington railway station]]
:[[Acle railway station]]

The semicolons indicate chapters and the colons indicate articles to include. Page breaks are generated by chapters only, not articles.

To generate the whole lot:

• Get the ORR station usage statistics file into Excel
• Use the Excel concatenate function to convert the list i.e. "Abbey Wood" to ":[[Abbey Wood railway station]]"
• Paste the converted list as Values
• Convert the Excel list to a plain TXT file
• Paste into the Wikipedia source box
• Check for any which have been incorrectly linked - these will show as red links
• Generate the PDF - and that's it!

 

[Muzer]

Not all incorrect ones will be redlinks. Some will link to disambiguation pages, eg where there is an identically-named station in America or Australia. You'd have to check each one, perhaps with a bot.