Railroad Employee Roundhouse is (pun mostly unintended) a Signal-to-Noise Trainwreck

Railroad Employee Roundhouse, at its core, is a pre-historic page both literally and figuratively. Figuratively in that it's a pre-March 2010 trope, but literally in that...it covers the early days of trains, when they could barely be called "trains" at all according to the modern definition. However, you would only know that from the title (and maybe the page image), because I am not exaggerating when I say that this page looks like a sandbox test edit gone wild.

Non-thriving issue aside, there's natter everywhere, no proper example sorting, the description is broken up first into "heroic/pioneering railroad brakeman types" and "railroad conductors being railroad conductors" and then a bunch of managerial positions of varying importance, with 2/3 of the examples being Zero Context Examples at best, not helped by the description making tenuous connections between other tropes (Railroad Brakeman and Railroad Laborer) or merely describing what they did instead of when their jobs went out of style or how they were pioneers of any degree. The kicker? The very first sentence of the page says, and I quote:

This has been here since the trope was launched in February 2009, with the oldest archive of the Western Characters page indicating that this was more specifically meant to be an amalgam of various now-defunct tropes pertaining to railroad jobs, working under the assumption that they could example-sort/expand later. While I do think it's possible for this trope to have expanded, it's held back by the long list of lax standards at the time it was created conflicting with how it should be handled now—Launch Displacement via a sandbox, cleaning wicks from the older Railroad-type tropes under the same desired outcome, etc. The question is, since that ship has sailed, how do we handle a page like this?

Edited by Coachpill on Nov 29th 2023 at 9:30:39 AM

Silver and gold, silver and gold

Bump

Silver and gold, silver and gold

Re-bump. Sorry if I seem impatient, I'm just kind of awed by this trope (for better or worse).

Silver and gold, silver and gold

Could it possibly be remade into a useful notes page? It obviously isn't a trope, but it does contain some information about railroads that seems to relate to how they're perceived in fiction. Either way, it would likely have to go through TRS.

Bigotry will NEVER be welcome on TV Tropes.

I was thinking about that, but it's in such disarray with all the run-on/bare-bones sentences and contradictory examples of subtypes that I'm not sure we wouldn't just have to write a new UN page from scratch.

Silver and gold, silver and gold

Not to nag or sound nitpicky, but the level of activity the left-side forums have is such that the span with which you'd want to bump a thread is closer to the scale of days, not hours. 24 hours might be enough to try a bump but not, like, three or four.

I noticed that in the description for railroad engineers it mentions that they're often portrayed as heroic, and there's several examples of real railroad engineers saving trains/passengers. That might work as a trope if there's enough examples of it happening in fiction.

Don't worry, I kinda figured I'd get this response not much longer after the fact.

Yeah, that would be worth yarding at the very least.

Edited by Coachpill on Dec 1st 2023 at 10:37:14 AM

Silver and gold, silver and gold