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Hugo Eckener

Hugo Eckener (10 August 1868 – 14 August 1954)  was the manager of the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin during the inter-war years, and also the commander of the famous Graf Zeppelin for most of its record-setting flights, including the first airship flight around the world, making him the most successful airship commander in history. He was also responsible for the construction of the most successful type of airships of all time. An anti-Nazi who was invited to campaign as a moderate in the German presidential elections, he was blacklisted by that regime and eventually sidelined.

Background
Eckener was born in Flensburg as the first child of Johann Christoph Eckener from Bremen and Anna Lange, daughter of a shoemaker. As a youth he was judged an "indifferent student", and he spent summers sailing and winters ice skating.

Nevertheless, by 1892 under Professor Wilhelm Wundt, Eckener had earned a doctorate "magna cum laude" in what today might be deemed experimental psychology. at Leipzig University.

Eckener then began his military service in the Infantry Regiment 86 in Flensburg.

Eckener's early career was as a journalist and editor; by August 1893 he was working for the Flensburger Nachrichten; in October 1897 he married Johanna, daughter of the publisher family Maaß. He later became a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1905 and 1906, whilst writing a book on the social effects of capitalism.

Pre-war airship activities
Asked to cover the first flights of the Zeppelins LZ 1 and LZ 2, Eckener was critical of both airships' marginal performances, but praised Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin's dedication to his cause. Because several scientists and engineers had criticized his airship plans, the Count sought to speak to Eckener. Eckener was so impressed by him that during October 1908 he agreed to be a part-time publicist for the Zeppelin Company. He became extremely interested in airships, and joined the company on a full-time basis.

His aptitude at flying was noticed early on in his career, and he became an airship captain, obtaining his airship license in 1911. However, when Eckener attempted his first flight on 16 May 1911 in the LZ 8, christened Deutschland II, he decided to launch it in a strong wind, which pushed the craft into the hangar wall, damaging it seriously. Nonetheless, he became a very successful airshipman.

World War I
Eckener was responsible for training most of Germany's airship pilots both during and after World War I. Despite his protestations, he was not allowed on operational missions due to his value as an instructor.

Head of the Zeppelin Company
After the War, Eckener succeeded Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, who had died on 8 March 1917. After considerable conflict with Zeppelin's business manager, Alfred Colsman, who wanted to replace the production of airships with production of other (and likely more profitable) products, Eckener was able to keep the Zeppelin factory at Friedrichshafen on Bodensee (Lake Constance) in Württemberg, southern Germany, from being retooled. Colsman left the company soon afterwards.

The Treaty of Versailles had forbidden Germans to construct airships of the size needed to operate the profitable trans-Atlantic service that was Eckener's goal. However, after much skillful lobbying, he persuaded the U.S. and German governments to allow the company to build LZ 126, later rechristened the USS Los Angeles (ZR-3), for the United States Navy as part of Germany's war reparations. Eckener captained the airship on its delivery flight to Lakehurst, New Jersey. The Los Angeles became the longest-serving rigid airship ever operated by the United States Navy.

The golden age of the rigid airship
Refused funds by the penniless Weimar government, Eckener and his colleagues began a nationwide fund-raising lecture tour in order to commence construction of Graf Zeppelin, which became the most successful rigid airship ever built.

The first flight to America was fraught with drama. Near Bermuda on the outbound flight the airship was nearly lost after becoming caught in a severe storm during which fabric was ripped off the left fin. The ship was saved only by Eckener's skilled piloting and the courage of his son, Knut Eckener, and other crew members who climbed out onto the fin to repair the damage. Upon arrival in America, a country which Eckener grew to love, he and the crew were subject to the first of two New York ticker tape parades.

Eckener captained Graf Zeppelin during most of its record-setting flights, including the 1928 first intercontinental passenger airship flight, the 1929 flight around the world (the only such flight by an airship, and the second by an aircraft of any type) and the 1931 Arctic flight.

A master of publicity as well as a master airship captain, Eckener used the Graf Zeppelin to establish the Zeppelin as a symbol of German pride and engineering.

After these flights the public treated Eckener as a national hero. During the early 1930s, Eckener was one of the most well-known and respected figures in Weimar Republic Germany. In the 1932 presidential election Eckener was a potential unity candidate against Adolf Hitler, encouraged to campaign by leaders of both the SPD and the Zentrum, but he bowed out when Paul von Hindenburg decided to run for a second term. However, his potential candidacy had already angered the Nazi Party. In supposed anger and fear of Eckener, Hitler's de facto deputy, Hermann Esser, once called him the "director of the flying Weisswurst", a greyish-white Bavarian sausage.

Sidelined
The Nazis came to power in January 1933. A planned arrest of Eckener in 1933 was blocked by Hindenburg. Hitler met Eckener only once, in July 1933, but the two barely spoke. Eckener did not make any secret of his dislike of the Nazis and the disastrous events he foresaw. He criticised the regime frequently, and refused to allow the Nazis to use the large hangars at Frankfurt for a rally. Eventually the Nazis declared Eckener to be persona non grata and his name was no longer allowed to appear in print.

During the 1930s, the Nazi government nationalized the Zeppelin operation under the name Deutsche Zeppelin-Reederei GmbH (DZR). The Nazis sidelined Eckener in favour of men who were more compliant with their wishes. In their haste to please the Nazi regime, these newly promoted airshipmen did not always obey Eckener's safety procedures. For example, the maiden voyage of the Hindenburg nearly resulted in disaster when Captain Ernst A. Lehmann brought the ship out in strong winds in order to undertake a Nazi propaganda flight. The ship was damaged, and there was an argument between Eckener, Lehmann and the Nazi propaganda ministry.

Hugo Eckener had always made safety his absolute priority during his many years managing airship operations. With Eckener's management, the Zeppelin company had a perfect safety record with no passenger ever sustaining a serious injury on any of the more than 1 million air miles that the rigid airships flew, until the Hindenburg disaster of 1937. . Eckener was in Graz, Austria when he heard news of the Hindenburg disaster on 6 May 1937. In the official inquiry he concluded that a static spark ignited leaking hydrogen in the aft section of the ship. The leak would have been caused by a sharp turn, which he believed overstrained a bracing wire, causing it to snap and rip open an adjacent gas cell.

After the destruction of the Hindenburg, the nearly-completed LZ-130 Graf Zeppelin II was redesigned as a helium-filled ship, although, owing to geo-political considerations, the American helium was not available.. Thus the ship never began commercial service. However, under the command of Captain Albert Sammt, who had previously survived the fiery destruction of the Hindenburg, albeit with severe burns, the ship performed an espionage mission off the coast of Great Britain, intended to investigate the radar defences. Eckener, however, had by this time little influence on the Zeppelin Company.

After World War II
Eckener survived World War II despite his disagreements with the Nazis. Post-war, he was involved in a plan by the Goodyear Zeppelin Corporation to build large rigid airships, but the project came to nothing.

In 1945, Johannes Weyl and Eckener co-founded the Südkurier regional newspaper and Eckener started writing for German-French co-operation. In November 1945 Eckener was confronted with the charge of collaboration with Nazi Germany. In 1947 the French occupying powers fined him. Many personalities lobbied for Eckener's rehabilitation. The judgement was rejected in July 1948 and Eckener was rehabilitated.

Eckener's home town of Flensburg had a Danish-oriented majority in its council since 1945, with the goal of unification with Denmark. Eckener remained active in local politics campaigning for a German majority in Flensburg, while at the same time, during a "thundering" one-hour speech in 1951, warning against small-mindedness in border concerns.

Eckener died in Friedrichshafen on 14 August 1954, four days after his 86th birthday.

Legacy
Eckener was responsible for many innovative aviation developments, notably the trans-Atlantic passenger services offered by the airships Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg.

Since his death his achievements have been remembered by airship enthusiasts and historians. Additionally, the town of Friedrichshafen, scene of his many triumphant homecomings in Graf Zeppelin, has recognised his memory by naming a large new conference centre after him.

In popular culture
Eckener features as a character in the 2004 short story "The Eckener Alternative" by James L. Cambias, the 2012 novel Flight from Berlin by David John, and in the novels Vango: Between Sky and Earth (2010) and "A Prince Without Kingdom" (2011) by Timothée de Fombelle. Eckener also appears as a character in the 2018 novel 'Beneath Gray Skies', by Hugh Ashton.

title: Hugo Eckener


text:
Talk:Zapatistas

I am not fixing the links to this page yet because I am not sure what the title of the original Zapatistas' page should be. Any suggestions?

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Zapatistas


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Enzo Matsunaga

Enzo Matsunaga (松永 延造) was a Japanese writer. He was born in Yokohama, Japan.

Major works
Matsunaga's major works include:

 * 夢を喰ふ人

title: Enzo Matsunaga


text:
Hakushū Kitahara

Hakushū Kitahara (北原 白秋) is the pen-name of Kitahara Ryūkichi (北原 隆吉), a Japanese tanka poet active during the Taishō and Shōwa periods of Japan. He is regarded as one of the most popular and important poets in modern Japanese literature.

Early life
Kitahara was born in Yanagawa, Fukuoka prefecture, to a family of sake brewers. He attended the English literature department of Waseda University, but he left the university soon after without graduating. As a student he became interested in the poetry of Tōson Shimazaki, especially his Wakanashu (Collection of Young Herbs, 1897), which was written in the Shintaishi, or New Style, format.

Literary career
In 1904, Kitahara moved to Tokyo and began submitting his poetry to various literary magazines. In 1906, he joined the Shinshisha (New Poetry Association) at the invitation of Yosano Tekkan, and he published poems in its magazine Myōjō (Bright Star) that brought him instant fame as a rising young poet, and served as an introduction to a wide circle of writers and poets. From these contacts, Kitahara formed his own literary group, the Pan no kai (The Society of Pan), which was innovative in including painters, musicians and actors as well as writers.

In 1909, he became one of the founding members of the literary magazine, Subaru (The Pleiades), where he published his first collection of verses, Jashumon (Heretics), which took the poetic world by storm. Through the use of its rich imagery and innovative structure, it (along with Yosano Akiko's Midaregami), is credited by critics with having set a new baseline for modern Japanese poetry. Kitahara's initial success was followed by Omoide (Memories, 1912), in which he evokes memories of the world from a child's perspective.

In 1907 he published the essays 5 Pairs of Shoes, together with Yosano Tekkan, Mokutaro Kinoshita, Hirano Banri and Yoshii Isamu.

In 1912, Kitahara was arrested for adultery and jailed for two weeks. Though the charges were later dropped, the experience was traumatic, as it was mentioned briefly in his first tanka anthology, Kiri no hana (Paulownia Blossoms, 1913), as having led to a religious influence in his outlook on life. This became evident in his second anthology, Shinju Sho (Selection of Pearls, 1914), and his third, Hakkin no koma (Platinum Top, 1915), which include one-line poems in the form of Buddhist prayers. He strove for what he called “oriental simplicity”, a concept which he borrowed from his understanding of Zen in Suibokushu (Collection of Ink drawings, 1923) and Suzume no tamago (Sparrow's Eggs, 1921).

Children's poems
In 1918, he joined the Akai tori (Red Bird) literary magazine at the request of founder Suzuki Miekichi, and was assigned to create children's songs, take charge of screening the poems submitted to the magazine, and collect nursery rhymes from around the country. The same year, he relocated from Tokyo to Odawara, Kanagawa. In 1919 he published Tonbo no medama (Dragonfly's Eyes), a collection of lyrics for children he had previously published serially in Akai Tori. In 1921 Maza gusu (Mother Goose), a collection of his translations of the English classic, came out, and that year, Usagi no denpo (Rabbit Telegrams), a collection of his nursery rhymes, was published. Starting with its April 1922 issue, Kodomo no kuni (Children's Land), it invited readers to submit children's songs, and Kitahara took charge of the screening and comments. In 1929 he published a collection of essays on children's songs, Midori no shokkaku (The Feel of Green).

Later life
Always enjoying travel, Kitahara visited Misaki, Chiba, Nagano, Shiobara in 1923, Shizuoka in 1924, Hokkaidō and Karafuto in 1925.

Kitahara moved back to Tokyo in 1926, living at first in Yanaka, then moving to Setagaya in 1928. Kitahara continued to experiment with his style, and continued to be inspired by classical Japanese literature (such as the Kojiki), as seen in his Kaihyo no kumo (Sea and Clouds, 1929). This later work was inspired by a trip from Oita to Osaka by airplane, which was sponsored by the Asahi Shimbun as a publicity stunt. In 1930, Kitahara travelled to Manchuria, and rode on the South Manchurian Railroad. On his return to Japan, he visited Nara.

In 1935, Kitahara founded Tama, a tanka magazine, and became known as the spearhead of the fourth stage of the symbolist movement. Among his protégés were Kimata Osamu and Miya Shuji. He also accepted an invitation by the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun to tour Korea (then under Japanese rule), in exchange for poems on his impressions. Kitahara remained active even after almost going blind due to complications arising from diabetes in 1937. In 1940, he returned for a visit to Yanagawa after many years, and also visited Miyazaki and Nara. That same year he was made a member of the Japan Art Academy. In 1942, his health condition worsened, and he died of complications from his diabetes. His grave is located at the Tama Reien in the outskirts of Tokyo.

Legacy
Kitahara published a total of over 200 books within his lifetime. In addition to his writings, he also edited the poetry magazine Chijo junrei (Earthly Pilgrimage), which enabled later authors, such as Hagiwara Sakutaro to get their start into the literary world. He also wrote anthems for high schools around the country, including Tōyō Eiwa Jogakuin. Many of his poems remain popular to this day. The Nihon Densho Doyo Shusei [Collection of Traditional Japanese Nursery Rhymes], a six-volume publication edited by Kitahara, finally came out in 1976.

An annual festival celebrating the life and works of Kitahara is still held in his hometown of Yanagawa during the month of November. Stages are set up along the canals of the city, and at night, by firelight, fans of Kitahara's works read poems and passages from them aloud. There are also canal parades and musical performances.

title: Hakushū Kitahara


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Climate of Missouri

Missouri generally has a variety of seasonal humid subtropical climate (Köppen climate classification Cfa), with cool winters and long, hot summers. In the southern part of the state, particularly in the Bootheel, the climate borders on a more mild-type humid subtropical climate (Köppen Cfa), and in the northern third, the state transitions into a humid continental climate (Köppen Dfa). Because of its location in the interior United States, Missouri often experiences extremes in temperatures. Lacking either large mountains or oceans nearby to moderate its temperature, its climate is alternately influenced by air from the cold Arctic and the hot and humid Gulf of Mexico.

Overview
While the adjacent table would suggest a very mild climate, a temperature fluctuation of 20 degrees Fahrenheit on average and 30 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit (17 to 22 degrees Celsius) in a twenty-four-hour period is common. Although the mean temperature for June and July is only 73 °F and 76 °F (23 °C and 24 °C) it is not uncommon for the temperature to reach 100 °F (38 °C) at least three concurrent days each week in these months, as it did in 1904 during the World Fair where the temperature in St. Louis, Missouri was 103 °F (39 °C).

Spring
Spring is generally the wettest season of the year, with the mean temperature from 1895 until 2003 being about 12 °C (54 °F) and its mean precipitation (in the form of rain) for this period being approximately 300 mm (12 inches). April through June is generally the wettest period. The spring also produces the most tornadoes, with an average of 35 tornadoes each year.

Summer
Summer, June through August, is the hottest time of the year with a mean temperature of 24 °C (75 °F) and a mean precipitation of 300 mm (12 inches) with June having more precipitation than either July or August. The extreme highs for the year often occur in July or August. Tropical cyclones and their remains can impact the state during this time of the year, contributing to area rainfall.

Autumn
Fall, September through November, has less and less precipitation towards the end of the season. The mean temperatures for this season are 13.6 °C (56.5 °F) and the mean precipitation is 250mm (10 in). Tropical cyclones and their remains can impact the state into October, contributing to area rainfall.

Winter
Winters in Missouri can be long with temperatures ranging from mildly to bitterly cold. Kansas City's January daily mean temperature is 26 °F and St. Louis's is 29 °F. The coldest temperature ever recorded in Missouri was -40 °F, set at Warsaw on 13 February 1905. Winter also tends to be the driest season, but typically yields significant amounts of winter precipitation. Snowfall averages 20 in in the state's northern region, and 10 in in the southeast. During the winter, northwest winds prevail; the air movement is largely from the south and southeast during the rest of the year.

title: Climate of Missouri


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Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or "organic" results) rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, the computer-programmed algorithms that dictate search engine behavior, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. SEO is performed because a website will receive more visitors from a search engine when websites rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP). These visitors can then potentially be converted into customers.

History
Webmasters and content providers began optimizing websites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all webmasters only needed to submit the address of a page, or URL, to the various engines, which would send a web crawler to crawl that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed. The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server. A second program, known as an indexer, extracts information about the page, such as the words it contains, where they are located, and any weight for specific words, as well as all links the page contains. All of this information is then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

Website owners recognized the value of a high ranking and visibility in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the phrase "search engine optimization" probably came into use in 1997. Sullivan credits Bruce Clay as one of the first people to popularize the term.

Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta tags provide a guide to each page's content. Using metadata to index pages was found to be less than reliable, however, because the webmaster's choice of keywords in the meta tag could potentially be an inaccurate representation of the site's actual content. Flawed data in meta tags, such as those that were inaccurate or incomplete, created the potential for pages to be mischaracterized in irrelevant searches. Web content providers also manipulated some attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines. By 1997, search engine designers recognized that webmasters were making efforts to rank well in their search engine and that some webmasters were even manipulating their rankings in search results by stuffing pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords. Early search engines, such as Altavista and Infoseek, adjusted their algorithms to prevent webmasters from manipulating rankings.

By heavily relying on factors such as keyword density, which were exclusively within a webmaster's control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. This meant moving away from heavy reliance on term density to a more holistic process for scoring semantic signals. Since the success and popularity of a search engine are determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search, poor quality or irrelevant search results could lead users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.

Companies that employ overly aggressive techniques can get their client websites banned from the search results. In 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported on a company, Traffic Power, which allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients. Wired magazine reported that the same company sued blogger and SEO Aaron Wall for writing about the ban. Google's Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.

Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences, webchats, and seminars. Major search engines provide information and guidelines to help with website optimization. Google has a Sitemaps program to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website. Bing Webmaster Tools provides a way for webmasters to submit a sitemap and web feeds, allows users to determine the "crawl rate", and track the web pages index status.

In 2015, it was reported that Google was developing and promoting mobile search as a key feature within future products. In response, many brands began to take a different approach to their Internet marketing strategies.

Relationship with Google
In 1998, two graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, developed "Backrub", a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links. PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random web surfer.

Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design. Off-page factors (such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) were considered as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency, meta tags, headings, links and site structure) to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters had already developed link-building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaming PageRank. Many sites focus on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming.

By 2004, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. The leading search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Some SEO practitioners have studied different approaches to search engine optimization and have shared their personal opinions. Patents related to search engines can provide information to better understand search engines. In 2005, Google began personalizing search results for each user. Depending on their history of previous searches, Google crafted results for logged in users.

In 2007, Google announced a campaign against paid links that transfer PageRank. On June 15, 2009, Google disclosed that they had taken measures to mitigate the effects of PageRank sculpting by use of the nofollow attribute on links. Matt Cutts, a well-known software engineer at Google, announced that Google Bot would no longer treat any no follow links, in the same way, to prevent SEO service providers from using nofollow for PageRank sculpting. As a result of this change, the usage of nofollow led to evaporation of PageRank. In order to avoid the above, SEO engineers developed alternative techniques that replace nofollowed tags with obfuscated JavaScript and thus permit PageRank sculpting. Additionally, several solutions have been suggested that include the usage of iframes, Flash, and JavaScript.

In December 2009, Google announced it would be using the web search history of all its users in order to populate search results. On June 8, 2010 a new web indexing system called Google Caffeine was announced. Designed to allow users to find news results, forum posts, and other content much sooner after publishing than before, Google Caffeine was a change to the way Google updated its index in order to make things show up quicker on Google than before. According to Carrie Grimes, the software engineer who announced Caffeine for Google, "Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index..." Google Instant, real-time-search, was introduced in late 2010 in an attempt to make search results more timely and relevant. Historically site administrators have spent months or even years optimizing a website to increase search rankings. With the growth in popularity of social media sites and blogs, the leading engines made changes to their algorithms to allow fresh content to rank quickly within the search results.

In February 2011, Google announced the Panda update, which penalizes websites containing content duplicated from other websites and sources. Historically websites have copied content from one another and benefited in search engine rankings by engaging in this practice. However, Google implemented a new system that punishes sites whose content is not unique. The 2012 Google Penguin attempted to penalize websites that used manipulative techniques to improve their rankings on the search engine. Although Google Penguin has been presented as an algorithm aimed at fighting web spam, it really focuses on spammy links by gauging the quality of the sites the links are coming from. The 2013 Google Hummingbird update featured an algorithm change designed to improve Google's natural language processing and semantic understanding of web pages. Hummingbird's language processing system falls under the newly recognized term of "conversational search", where the system pays more attention to each word in the query in order to better match the pages to the meaning of the query rather than a few words. With regards to the changes made to search engine optimization, for content publishers and writers, Hummingbird is intended to resolve issues by getting rid of irrelevant content and spam, allowing Google to produce high-quality content and rely on them to be 'trusted' authors.

In October 2019, Google announced they would start applying BERT models for English language search queries in the US. Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) was another attempt by Google to improve their natural language processing, but this time in order to better understand the search queries of their users. In terms of search engine optimization, BERT intended to connect users more easily to relevant content and increase the quality of traffic coming to websites that are ranking in the Search Engine Results Page.

Getting indexed
The leading search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine-indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. The Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ, two major directories which closed in 2014 and 2017 respectively, both required manual submission and human editorial review. Google offers Google Search Console, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that are not discoverable by automatically following links in addition to their URL submission console. Yahoo! formerly operated a paid submission service that guaranteed to crawl for a cost per click; however, this practice was discontinued in 2009.

Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by search engines. The distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.

Mobile devices are used for the majority of Google searches. In November 2016, Google announced a major change to the way they are crawling websites and started to make their index mobile-first, which means the mobile version of a given website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index. In May 2019, Google updated the rendering engine of their crawler to be the latest version of Chromium (74 at the time of the announcement). Google indicated that they would regularly update the Chromium rendering engine to the latest version. In December 2019, Google began updating the User-Agent string of their crawler to reflect the latest Chrome version used by their rendering service. The delay was to allow webmasters time to update their code that responded to particular bot User-Agent strings. Google ran evaluations and felt confident the impact would be minor.

Preventing crawling
To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots (usually  ). When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is then parsed and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled. As a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wish to crawl. Pages typically prevented from being crawled include login-specific pages such as shopping carts and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches. In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should prevent indexing of internal search results because those pages are considered search spam. In 2020, Google sunsetted the standard (and open-sourced their code) and now treats it as a hint not a directive. To adequately ensure that pages are not indexed, a page-level robot's meta tag should be included.

Increasing prominence
A variety of methods can increase the prominence of a webpage within the search results. Cross linking between pages of the same website to provide more links to important pages may improve its visibility. Page design makes users trust a site and want to stay once they find it. When people bounce off a site, it counts against the site and affects its credibility. Writing content that includes frequently searched keyword phrases so as to be relevant to a wide variety of search queries will tend to increase traffic. Updating content so as to keep search engines crawling back frequently can give additional weight to a site. Adding relevant keywords to a web page's metadata, including the title tag and meta description, will tend to improve the relevancy of a site's search listings, thus increasing traffic. URL canonicalization of web pages accessible via multiple URLs, using the canonical link element or via 301 redirects can help make sure links to different versions of the URL all count towards the page's link popularity score. These are known as incoming links, which point to the URL and can count towards the page link's popularity score, impacting the credibility of a website.

White hat versus black hat techniques
SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engine companies recommend as part of good design ("white hat"), and those techniques of which search engines do not approve ("black hat"). Search engines attempt to minimize the effect of the latter, among them spamdexing. Industry commentators have classified these methods and the practitioners who employ them as either white hat SEO or black hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.

An SEO technique is considered a white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the online "spider" algorithms, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines or involve deception. One black hat technique uses hidden text, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off-screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking. Another category sometimes used is grey hat SEO. This is in between the black hat and white hat approaches, where the methods employed avoid the site being penalized but do not act in producing the best content for users. Grey hat SEO is entirely focused on improving search engine rankings.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black or grey hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms or by a manual site review. One example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for the use of deceptive practices. Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's search engine results page.

As marketing strategy
SEO is not an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be more effective, such as paid advertising through pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, depending on the site operator's goals. Search engine marketing (SEM) is the practice of designing, running, and optimizing search engine ad campaigns. Its difference from SEO is most simply depicted as the difference between paid and unpaid priority ranking in search results. SEM focuses on prominence more so than relevance; website developers should regard SEM with the utmost importance with consideration to visibility as most navigate to the primary listings of their search. A successful Internet marketing campaign may also depend upon building high-quality web pages to engage and persuade internet users, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure results, and improving a site's conversion rate. In November 2015, Google released a full 160-page version of its Search Quality Rating Guidelines to the public, which revealed a shift in their focus towards "usefulness" and mobile local search. In recent years the mobile market has exploded, overtaking the use of desktops, as shown in by StatCounter in October 2016, where they analyzed 2.5 million websites and found that 51.3% of the pages were loaded by a mobile device. Google has been one of the companies that are utilizing the popularity of mobile usage by encouraging websites to use their Google Search Console, the Mobile-Friendly Test, which allows companies to measure up their website to the search engine results and determine how user-friendly their websites are. The closer the keywords are together their ranking will improve based on key terms.

SEO may generate an adequate return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals. Due to this lack of guarantee and uncertainty, a business that relies heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending visitors. Search engines can change their algorithms, impacting a website's search engine ranking, possibly resulting in a serious loss of traffic. According to Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, in 2010, Google made over 500 algorithm changes – almost 1.5 per day. It is considered a wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic. In addition to accessibility in terms of web crawlers (addressed above), user web accessibility has become increasingly important for SEO.

International markets
Optimization techniques are highly tuned to the dominant search engines in the target market. The search engines' market shares vary from market to market, as does competition. In 2003, Danny Sullivan stated that Google represented about 75% of all searches. In markets outside the United States, Google's share is often larger, and Google remains the dominant search engine worldwide as of 2007. As of 2006, Google had an 85–90% market share in Germany. While there were hundreds of SEO firms in the US at that time, there were only about five in Germany. As of June 2008, the market share of Google in the UK was close to 90% according to Hitwise. That market share is achieved in a number of countries.

As of 2009, there are only a few large markets where Google is not the leading search engine. In most cases, when Google is not leading in a given market, it is lagging behind a local player. The most notable example markets are China, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the Czech Republic, where respectively Baidu, Yahoo! Japan, Naver, Yandex and Seznam are market leaders.

Successful search optimization for international markets may require professional translation of web pages, registration of a domain name with a top level domain in the target market, and web hosting that provides a local IP address. Otherwise, the fundamental elements of search optimization are essentially the same, regardless of language.

Legal precedents
On October 17, 2002, SearchKing filed suit in the United States District Court, Western District of Oklahoma, against the search engine Google. SearchKing's claim was that Google's tactics to prevent spamdexing constituted a tortious interference with contractual relations. On May 27, 2003, the court granted Google's motion to dismiss the complaint because SearchKing "failed to state a claim upon which relief may be granted."

In March 2006, KinderStart filed a lawsuit against Google over search engine rankings. KinderStart's website was removed from Google's index prior to the lawsuit, and the amount of traffic to the site dropped by 70%. On March 16, 2007, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California (San Jose Division) dismissed KinderStart's complaint without leave to amend and partially granted Google's motion for Rule 11 sanctions against KinderStart's attorney, requiring him to pay part of Google's legal expenses.

title: Search engine optimization


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Lira

 Lira  is the name of several currency units. It is the current currency of Turkey and also the local name of the currencies of Lebanon and of Syria. It is also the name of several former currencies, including those of Italy, Malta and Israel. The term originates from the value of a Roman pound (libra, about 329g, 10.58 troy ounces) of high purity silver. The libra was the basis of the monetary system of the Roman Empire. When Europe resumed a monetary system, during the Carolingian Empire, the Roman system was adopted. The Roman denominations librae, solidi, denarii were used (becoming known in England as £sd).

Specifically, this system was kept during the Middle Ages and Modern Age in England, France, and Italy. In each of these countries the libra was translated into local language: pound in England, livre in France, lira in Italy. The Venetian lira was one of the currencies in use in Italy and due to the economic power of the Venetian Republic a popular currency in the Eastern Mediterranean trade.

During the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire and the Eyalet of Egypt adopted the lira as their national currency, equivalent to 100 piasters or kuruş. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed between 1918 and 1922, many of the successor states retained the lira as their national currency. In some countries, such as Cyprus, which have belonged to both the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire, the words lira and pound are used interchangeably.

Lira sign
For the Turkish lira, the Turkish lira sign is used. The Lebanese lira uses £L (before numerals) or L.L. (after numerals) in Latin and ل.ل. in Arabic. The Syrian lira uses £S (before numerals) or L.S. (after numerals) in Latin and ل.س in Arabic.

The Italian lira had no official sign, but the abbreviations L. and Lit. and the symbols ₤ (two bars), £ (one bar) were all commonly used.

The Maltese lira used £M before 1986 and Lm thereafter (both as prefixes), though £M continued to be used in unofficial capacities.

The Unicode system allocated to the Italian lira, to provide compatibility with a legacy HP character set. As with, where the one-bar and the two-bar versions are treated as allographs and the choice between them is merely stylistic, no evidence has been found that either style predominated in Italy or anywhere else.

Turkey
The Turkish lira was introduced in 1844 during the Ottoman reign. The Turkish lira is now the currency of Turkey and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and used in Turkish-occupied northern Syria.

Lebanon and Syria
The Lebanese pound and Syrian pound are both called "lira" (ليرة) in Arabic, the national language of both Lebanon and Syria.

Italy
The lira was the currency of Italy from its unification until it was merged into the euro in 1999. A unit of currency lira had previously been used in some of the states and possessions that became Italy but their values were not necessarily equivalent. (See Luccan lira, Papal lira, Parman lira, Sardinian lira and Tuscan lira.)

Former currencies named lira

 * Cypriot lira/pound 1879–2007; merged into the euro, 2008
 * French livre 781–1794; became the French franc
 * Israeli lira/pound 1948–1980; replaced by the old shekel in 1980.
 * Italian lira 1861–2002; merged into the euro, 1999 (notes and coins from 2002)
 * Italian East African lira 1938–1941; supplanted by the East African shilling
 * Italian Somaliland lira 1925–1926; replaced by the Italian East African lira
 * Luccan lira until 1800 and 1826–1847; merged into the Italian lira
 * Maltese lira 1825–2007; merged into the euro, 2008
 * Neapolitan lira 1812–1813; merged into the Italian lira
 * Ottoman lira 1844–1923; became the Turkish lira
 * Papal lira 1866–1870; became the Vatican lira at par with the Italian lira
 * Parman lira before 1802 and 1815–1859; merged into the Italian lira
 * Sammarinese lira 1860s–2002; merged into the euro
 * Sardinian lira 1816–1861; merged into the Italian lira
 * Tripolitanian lira 1943–1951; replaced by the Libyan pound
 * Tuscan lira until 1807 and 1814–1826; merged into the Italian lira
 * Vatican lira 1929–2002; merged into the euro
 * Venetian lira 1472–1807; merged into the Italian lira

title: Lira


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Miekichi Suzuki

Miekichi Suzuki (鈴木 三重吉) was a Japanese novelist and author of children's stories from Hiroshima.

Biography
Suzuki was born in Hiroshima. He studied English literature at Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo), and later launched a children's literature magazine called 赤い鳥 (Akai tori / Red Bird) in 1918. Unusually for its time, the journal emphasized learning from observation and experience rather than rote learning, and focused on everyday language as much as ceremonial language. 196 issues were published.

Major works
Suzuki's major works include:
 * Kojiki Monogatari (古事記物語)
 * Daishin Kasai Ki (大震火災記)
 * Bukubuku naganaga hinome kozou (ぶくぶく長々火の目小僧)

title: Miekichi Suzuki


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Sadakazu Fujii

Sadakazu Fujii (藤井 貞和) is a Japanese poet and scholar of Japanese literature, which includes the genres of ancient novels, the Man'yōshū, oral literature, Okinawan culture, Ainu language, and contemporary poetry. He is well known for his study on the Genji Monogatari. His poems and palindromes have been used in the musical compositions of Takahashi Yuji.

Publications

 * The New Poetry of Japan—The 70s and 80s. Eds. Thomas Fitzsimmons and Yoshimasu Gozo. Katydid Books. 1993. 186 pp. Paper, ISBN 0-942668-36-7. [The book contains the works of five Japanese poets from the '70s and '80s, including Fujii Sadakazu, Hirata Toshiko, Matsuura Hisaki, Yoshida Tuminori, and Inagawa Masato.]
 * The Relationship Between the Romance, and Religious Observances: Genji Monogatari as Myth. Fujii Sadakazu. Japanese journal of Religious Studies 912-3 June–September 1982 PDF file
 * Monogatari riron kogi [Lectures on the Theory of Narrative], By Fujii Sadakazu, Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 2004. 212, 150 mm. 224 pp. ISBN 4-13-083038-4.
 * Monogatari bungaku seiritsushi (History of the Rise of Monogatari Literature). Fujii, Sadakazu. Tokyo: Tokyo UP, 1987.

title: Sadakazu Fujii


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User talk:Marcel~enwiki

Dear Marcel: Hi thank you for fixing my name on the wikipedians by interest page. Since at other pages its not recommendable to double-link, I thought of not double-linking myself there.

Thanks, and God bless you!

Sincerely yours, Antonio Girls Just Wanna Have Fun And so do Boys Martin

Hello there, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you need pointers on how we title pages visit Naming conventions or how to format them visit our manual of style. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Help or add a question to the Village pump. Cheers! --maveric149

Dear Marcel, what for do you need meconium.org ?? It's so like the wikipedia --ilya 07:14, 21 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Invite
Hi

I'm posting this to invite you to participate in WP:LCOTW, a project you may be interested in. Please consider nominating and/or voting for a suitable article there. Filiocht 12:33, Nov 8, 2004 (UTC)

Handbook of Texas proposed deletion
Please go here and express your opinion on whether Category:Handbook of Texas citations should be deleted. As a Texan Wikipedian, your opinion on this topic is particularly valuable. 66.167.253.162 17:55, 26 September 2005 (UTC).

Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, Houston City Council member and candidate for Congress from Houston/Sugar Land
Please review the debate on this article for deletion and provide your opinion please: Articles for deletion/Shelley Sekula-Gibbs. Thank you. --Getaway 22:19, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Your account will be renamed
Hello,

The developer team at Wikimedia is making some changes to how accounts work, as part of our on-going efforts to provide new and better tools for our users like cross-wiki notifications. These changes will mean you have the same account name everywhere. This will let us give you new features that will help you edit and discuss better, and allow more flexible user permissions for tools. One of the side-effects of this is that user accounts will now have to be unique across all 900 Wikimedia wikis. See the announcement for more information.

Unfortunately, your account clashes with another account also called Marcel. To make sure that both of you can use all Wikimedia projects in future, we have reserved the name Marcel~enwiki that only you will have. If you like it, you don't have to do anything. If you do not like it, you can pick out a different name. If you think you might own all of the accounts with this name and this message is in error, please visit Special:MergeAccount to check and attach all of your accounts to prevent them from being renamed.

Your account will still work as before, and you will be credited for all your edits made so far, but you will have to use the new account name when you log in.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Yours, Keegan Peterzell Community Liaison, Wikimedia Foundation 01:37, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Renamed
 This account has been renamed as part of single-user login finalisation. If you own this account you can |log in using your previous username and password for more information. If you do not like this account's new name, you can choose your own using this form after logging in: . -- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 15:53, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

title: User talk:Marcel~enwiki


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Stratford-upon-Avon and Midland Junction Railway

The Stratford-upon-Avon and Midland Junction Railway (SMJR) was a railway company in the southern Midlands of England, formed at the beginning of 1909 by the merger of three earlier companies: In 1910 the Northampton and Banbury Junction Railway was purchased and an east–west network was formed which linked routes to Bedford and Northampton in the east to lines leading towards Banbury and Gloucester in the west, by way of Towcester and Stratford-on-Avon.
 * the East and West Junction Railway,
 * the Evesham, Redditch, and Stratford-upon-Avon Junction Railway, and
 * the Stratford-upon-Avon, Towcester, and Midland Junction Railway.

The constituent lines had each been built with a view to carrying Northamptonshire iron ore to South Wales and the West Midlands, but they were all unable to finance their planned lines in full. The formation of the SMJR in 1909 was in effect a financial reconstruction, but the management of the combined company also showed a certain flair for generating tourist income, based on the connection with Shakespeare and also the family connections with George Washington. Additionally, the line developed as a shorter route for Midland Railway goods traffic from the Bristol area to London.

Some upgrading of the poor-quality infrastructure was undertaken, and some heavy mineral flows – continuing until as late as 1960 – passed along the line, but the severe operational constraints led to the diversion of traffic to other routes in 1964. By that time all of the passenger traffic had dwindled to nothing and the line was closed down piece by piece. A short section of the original network remains in use serving a Ministry of Defence depot at Kineton.

Origins
The Stratford-upon-Avon and Midland Junction Railway (SMJR) was formed by the combination of four railway companies. Those companies themselves had been formed with the intention of facilitating the transport of Northamptonshire iron ore to South Wales. The ironstone available to the South Wales iron-making industries had become scarce and was of poor quality, and there was huge demand. The Northamptonshire ore was not of the highest quality but it was abundantly available and conveying it to South Wales was worthwhile.

The Northampton and Banbury Junction Railway
The Northampton and Banbury Railway was authorised by Act of Parliament on 9 July 1847, with the intention of connecting the ironstone fields of Northamptonshire with a market for iron ore in South Wales. In the first instance it was to do this by connecting from Gayton Wharf, near Northampton, to the Buckinghamshire Railway, at Cockley Brake, near Banbury, running via Towcester.

In fact the ambitious scheme failed to raise the capital it needed to carry out its plans, and it had to obtain powers for an extension of time when the original authorisation lapsed; the second Act was passed on 28 July 1863; the name was changed to the Northampton and Banbury Junction Railway (N&BJR). Even then it was forced to content itself with a short line from Blisworth, on the London and North Western Railway (LNWR) main line to Towcester, opened on 1 May 1866. It built its own station at Blisworth alongside the LNWR station.

The N&BJR extended its line to Cockley Brake, approaching Banbury, on 1 June 1872 (authorised by a further bill in 1870). Goods traffic had been carried as far as Helmdon since August 1871. The extension was 15 mi in length, and was constructed using very light permanent way materials, which caused difficulties later. The junction at Cockley Brake was over 5 mi from Banbury, and running powers over the Buckinghamshire Railway were necessary to reach that place. The company was able to operate a passenger service from Blisworth through Towcester, Wappenham, Helmdon and Cockley Brake to Banbury. It worked the line itself with second hand engines acquired from the LNWR until 1875, from which time they were hired from that company throughout the remaining lifetime of the N&BJR.

Still intending to reach South Wales independently, the N&BJR obtained authorisation for a further extension to Blockley, Gloucestershire, (near Moreton-in-Marsh) in 1865 and to Ross-on-Wye in 1866. This line would have turned south-west on the approach to Banbury; the company signalled its intention by changing its name to the Midland Counties and South Wales Railway. However it quickly became obvious that these ambitious plans—96 mi of railway was contemplated at a cost of £1,250,000—were impossible to put into effect, and the company reverted to its former name. In fact the desired connecting line across the hills to Chipping Norton was built much later by the Banbury and Cheltenham Direct Railway, which opened on 6 April 1887. The Northampton and Banbury Junction Railway did not generate much passenger traffic, and the train service was limited to three or four return trains daily, but cattle proved a very successful traffic as Banbury cattle market grew in importance.

The small scale ironstone workings around Blisworth and Gayton (just over 1 mi south-west of Blisworth on the N&BJR line) developed in the 1880s and with the advance of mechanisation so the workings expanded considerably; this later became an extensive site operated by Richard Thomas and Baldwins.

The East and West Junction Railway
The next line to be authorised was the East and West Junction Railway (E&WJR); it obtained its Act of Parliament on 23 June 1864. It was to build a 33 mi line from the Northampton and Banbury Junction Railway at Green's Norton Junction, a short distance west of Towcester, and to continue from there, crossing the Great Western Railway south of Fenny Compton, to join the Stratford on Avon Railway at Stratford-upon-Avon. That was planned to give the E&WJR access both to Birmingham northwards and via Honeybourne south-westwards; the authorised line included running powers over the Northampton and Banbury Junction Railway between Towcester and Blisworth.

The huge authorised capital of £300,000 turned out to be not enough and in 1866 a further Act for another £300,000 was passed. Also in the same year the company submitted a bill to extend from Towcester to join the Great Northern Railway (GNR) at Hitchin, on condition that the GNR subscribed £200,000. The evident objective was to create a further London connection in which the E&WJR would be a major partner. The GNR declined to make the financial commitment; powers to extend westward to Worcester were also considered, but that scheme was abandoned. Obtaining Parliamentary authority to raise capital was one thing, but it proved much more difficult actually to obtain the money from potential subscribers.

On 1 June 1871 the first section of the line, from Fenny Compton to Kineton, a distance of six miles, was opened and a passenger service started over that section. They hired a contractor's engine for the purpose and later bought it, at which stage the locomotive became E&WJR no. 1.

A further time extension had to be sought in Parliament, and preference loans obtained to build further, but on 1 July 1873 the western (Stratford to Kineton) and eastern (Fenny Compton to Green's Norton Junction, Towcester) ends of the line were ready, and trains ran between Blisworth and Stratford. Between Blisworth and Green's Norton Junction this was by running powers over the Northampton and Banbury Junction Railway. At the Stratford end the company was to build its own station, but at first the GWR station, accessed by a spur connection, was used. In June 1875 the E&WJR had a temporary station of its own ready and trains were transferred to that, and they opened a permanent station in January 1876.

However, soon after the opening, a newspaper believed that the E&WJR was using its own, separate station:

"We hope to see the East and West Junction running into the Great Western line at this town. Every one is too familiar with the annoyances of a break in the line of communication, and travellers by the east and West Junction coming from the south and desirous of proceeding to Birmingham &c., have to land at one end of Stratford and journey by omnibus or car, or walk to the opposite extremity of the town, causing fatigue, anxiety, and delay... we hope some means will be used to effect a junction in the two lines, so that one station can be used, and the Great Western Company have a station in the Alcester-road, particularly accessible from the town."

From this time the London and North Western Railway ran through carriages from London Euston to Stratford via Blisworth.

Income on the E&WJR was so poor that it fell into receivership from 29 January 1875 to 1902. The passenger service was withdrawn from 31 July 1877 and not resumed until 2 March 1885.

"The East and West Junction Railway, which runs from Stratford-on-Avon to Blisworth, a distance of about 40 mi, was opened for passenger traffic on Monday [2 March 1885].'"

The Evesham, Redditch and Stratford-upon-Avon Junction Railway
The E&WJR still saw its destiny in reaching further west, giving access ultimately to the iron industries of South Wales and the West Midlands, and if possible avoiding dependency on the powerful Great Western Railway (GWR) at Stratford. The Evesham and Redditch Railway had opened a north–south line in 1866, and was aligned to the Midland Railway. Its line lay only eight miles west of Stratford, and the E&WJR sponsored the promotion of the Evesham, Redditch and Stratford-upon-Avon Junction Railway. This line was authorised on 5 August 1873, and ran west from Stratford to a junction at Broom on the E&RR. The junction at Broom led towards Birmingham. The heavy mineral traffic was destined to move southwards, and the reversal in the restricted layout was to prove inconvenient.

It opened on 2 June 1879 and the seven mile line was worked by the E&WJR. Running powers were obtained to Redditch, but they were only exercised from the junction at Broom to the station there.

This line was immediately unprofitable and it too went into receivership, but continuing to trade, from 2 January 1886.

The Stratford-upon-Avon, Towcester and Midland Junction Railway
Continuing its quest to find a connecting line that would be successful, the E&WJR now looked to the south-east. It observed that the Bedford and Northampton Railway opened its line in 1872; aligned to the Midland Railway it connected to the Midland main line to Bedford and London. Olney, on the B&NR, was only ten miles or so east of Towcester.

In 1879 the East and West Junction Railway sponsored this line; it would build from Towcester to a junction near Olney (Ravenstone Junction). The proposed railway was called the Easton Neston Mineral and Towcester, Roade and Olney Junction Railway; it was incorporated on 15 August 1879, with share capital of £230,000. Running powers for goods and mineral trains were granted to the Midland Railway. The ten mile line took some time to construct due to difficulty in raising money, and before it opened the company changed its name to the Stratford-upon-Avon, Towcester and Midland Junction Railway (ST&MJR), by an Act of 10 August 1882.

In 1883 a joint committee was formed with the East and West Junction Railway to operate the line. It opened to goods traffic on 13 April 1891. The line crossed the LNWR main line at Roade, and a short spur for goods purposes was laid in to connect with that line. The spur was only used for exchange of goods wagons, and in later years the signalbox at the junction on the ST&MJR line was replaced by a ground frame; the daily goods train exchanging wagons waited at the ground frame while the fireman walked to the LNWR signalbox to collect the train staff for the line, returning to his train to unlock the ground frame with the key on the train staff.

A passenger service on the ST&MJR main line was inaugurated on 1 December 1892, operated by hiring in a Midland Railway locomotive and coaches, but this was unsuccessful and it ceased from 30 March 1893.

Cheap iron ore from Spain became easily available before the line opened, and abstracted most of the intended revenue. Nonetheless the Midland Railway was quick to exploit the new shorter route from the West of England to London and by 1883 was working goods trains between Broom Junction and Olney with its own engines. The Midland Railway locomotives proved too heavy for the lightly constructed permanent way on the line and the local company's own engines were substituted.

The passenger station at Broom was an unadvertised exchange platform only at first, but it became a public station on 1 November 1880.

To add to the financial agonies, the ST&MJR was obliged to modernise the E&WJR lines, which had been built cheaply of poorly specified materials: £160,000 was to be spent; evidently the ST&MJR was in part intended as a means of financial manipulation to rescue the E&WJR. Nonetheless, the money was simply not available.

The Great Central Railway
In 1893 the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway (MS&LR) purchased £294,971 worth of shares in the East and West Junction Railway and £42,345 worth in the Evesham, Redditch and Stratford Junction Railway with an eye to future use, and the MS&LR now had majority voting in the two smaller companies. The MS&LR was planning its London extension, and it changed its name to the Great Central Railway (GCR) in 1897. When it opened the London extension line in 1899, the GCR provided a north-facing and a south-facing spur where it crossed the Stratford line at Byfield to Woodford on the GCR, opened 15 March 1899. It closed again to passenger trains in August 1899 and to goods traffic on 22 October 1900. While open, it carried the 5.20 pm train from London Marylebone to Byfield, which was then attached to the 7.17 pm Blisworth to Stratford train.

There was a north curve opened at the same time and it remained open much longer; the Marylebone to Stratford through carriage was slipped at Woodford and ran to Stratford over the north curve. The through carriage was operated from 16 June 1902. The curve closed to passengers on 31 May 1948 and to goods on 1 March 1965.

The Stratford-upon-Avon and Midland Junction Railway
The three railways – the E&WJR, the ST&MJR, and the ER&SJR – were only notionally independent and the reality was given official recognition when an Act of 13 April 1891 established a Joint Committee of the three lines, which could now openly work in concert. The network reached from the Midland Railway at Broom to the Midland at Olney, a west-to-east spread of nearly 60 miles.

The Midland Railway had been running through goods and mineral trains over the line between Broom and Olney for some time with its own engines, but the very light track on the SMJR line was experiencing serious damage, and from 8 December 1891 the Midland engines were taken off and the through traffic worked by SMJR engines.

The Joint Committee had made strenuous efforts to sell its lines to a larger railway, ideally the Midland Railway, but notwithstanding the interest shown by the GCR, no company made an offer; the lines were still heavily loss-making and there was a huge backlog of modernisation and upgrading required. The Joint Committee decided to try to raise more money on the market, and to amalgamate their three lines formally, and to create £600,000 of capital. This was authorised by the Stratford-upon-Avon and Midland Junction Railway (Amalgamation) Act of 1 August 1908, by which the three railways were formed into the SMJR; the merger was effective on 1 January 1909, and the Joint Committee was dissolved on 21 April 1909. The attractiveness of investing in this new company must have been affected by the fact that the total population between Broom and Blisworth was only 18,000 in 1900: the only large settlements were Towcester (population 2,775) and Stratford-upon-Avon (8,500).

The Northampton and Banbury Junction Railway joined the new group by being purchased by the SMJR for £53,223. This was authorised by an Act of 29 April 1910, which took effect on 1 July 1910.

The chairman of the SMJR was Harry Willmott, and his son Russell Willmott was appointed traffic manager and engineer from 31 December 1913. The Willmotts were energetic in promoting the tourism potential of the line; in addition to the connection with Shakespeare at Stratford, there were considerable areas of natural beauty on the line, and combined tickets were issued for excursions including river trips and refreshments. Moreton Pinkney station was entitled Moreton Pinkney for Sulgrave from 10 January 1913 to build on the connection with the family of George Washington, who had inhabited Sulgrave Manor. The line was promoted in publicity material as The Shakespeare Route, and powers were obtained in 1910 to operate motor buses.

Certain economies in train mileage were possible after acquisition of the Northampton line, and the opportunity was taken to rationalise the junction at Greens Norton: the junction (and signalbox) was abolished by running a second single track from Towcester; two single tracks ran side by side, and for the expense of the additional track the signalmen's wages were saved.

For some time the Midland Railway had been using the route for its Bristol to London traffic, in competition with the Great Western Railway which had a more advantageous route. For a time this usage of the Stratford route flourished, but the Midland withdrew the lucrative banana traffic—5,500 tons and £1,100 in revenue annually—from Avonmouth to London, and also coal traffic to London, from 1912 or 1913. The long single line through Stratford with inevitable traffic delays and slow permitted speeds militated against reliable use of the line.

Railophone
A means of instant communication with moving trains had long been wished for, and in 1910 an experiment was carried out on the line with the Railophone system that had been developed by an engineer by the name of Hans von Kramer. A demonstration set-up was installed on the SMJR line; an inductive conductor was placed along the track, and two sets of coils in the train were able to receive and transmit speech. Apparatus was fitted that enabled an electrical signal to the train to apply the train brakes in an emergency. A public demonstration of the system was arranged for 28 June 1912.

In view of the extraordinary number of terrible railway accidents that have occurred in different parts of the world during the last few months, the latest invention in the science of wireless electricity deserves far more public attention than has been given to it. [The invention] promises to create a beneficial revolution in railway traffic by making a train the safest as well as the most comfortable means of travelling. As soon as the "railophone" comes into general use a collision between two trains will practically be an impossibility. Moreover, the difficult art of the signalman will be transformed into a science. The reach and flexibility of the arm of the law will be marvellously extended to the detriment of wrongdoers flying from justice; and a passenger on an English express, while travelling along at 60 mph will soon be able to hold a quiet conversation with a person as far away as Astrakan.

Mr Hans von Kramer, the inventor of the "railophone," is an electrical engineer of Birmingham. He has worked on the old idea of electro-magnetic induction discovered by Faraday about 80 years ago.

The demonstration was evidently a technical success; as well as showing that trains could be stopped remotely, von Kramer accidentally leant on the activation button and a movement shunting to the platform was instantly stopped. Nonetheless the cost of installing the system on a widespread basis seems to have deterred its general adoption.

From 1914
During World War I the railways came under the control of a Railway Executive Committee, and leisure travel was discouraged.

On 24 May 1917 the connection at Roade to the LNWR was removed, and the track materials were reused elsewhere.

During the war there was heavy demand for iron ore for the materiel of war. Harry Willmott drew attention to the large deposits of easily winnable iron ore near Burton Dassett; 30 million tons were claimed to be accessible. A suggestion from Willmott that the government might wish to support a railway to get access to the deposits did not find favour, and commercial interests combined to build an access line privately. The ironstone was to be extracted by the Edge Hill Ironstone Company.

The Edge Hill Light Railway
A provisional railway company, the Edge Hill Light Railway, was formed, and the engineer and manager Colonel Stephens was engaged to plan the line. Eleven miles of railway were designed including an incline at 1 in 6 to reach an altitude of 700 ft. Capital was to be £200,000. However, there was intense local opposition on the grounds of spoilt amenity. The resulting negotiations resulted in a railway network planned to be less than 6 mi in extent, with capital of £90,000, joining the SMJR lines at Burton Dassett.

A Light Railway Order was issued on 28 January 1919; the track was to be standard gauge. The incline was on the balanced system, with descending loaded wagons hauling empties upwards by a cable. Two former London, Brighton and South Coast Railway "terrier" locomotives and a former Manning Wardle 0-4-0ST locomotive were engaged on the construction work.

The mines started production on 22 January 1922, obviously too late to assist in the war effort, and the railway started work in June 1922. Indeed, the market for the ore was not what had been assumed; the quality was indifferent and the demand was considerably reduced. Production ceased on 27 January 1925, at first apparently temporarily but the work never resumed.

After 1923
The railways of Great Britain were "grouped" following the Railways Act 1921; the SMJR was a subsidiary of the new London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS), and the Midland Railway and the LNWR were constituents of it. SMJR consisted of 67 mi of route and had a capital value of £600,000. Ordinary shareholders received 39% of their shareholding face value in cash. A dividend of 1% had been paid in 1921 and 0.5% in 1922.

The LMS was in competition with the GWR and in 1927–28 it put in hand work to upgrade the line to use it for traffic from Bristol and Avonmouth. Track was relaid and upgraded, with extensions to the passing loops, and signalling systems were improved. Banana specials ran on the route once more, a remarkably lucrative traffic. The speed limit on the line was raised to 45 mph.

For some years the railways had been giving attention to the economical carriage of passengers on very lightly used lines. A number of options were tried, and in 1931 the LMS arranged with the company Karrier of Huddersfield, who produced a vehicle that came to be called the "Ro-railer". It strongly resembled an ordinary 26-seat single decker bus; the bodywork was supplied by Cravens of Sheffield. It had pneumatic-tyred road wheels and railway wheels as well. The railway wheels were wood laminate; a wooden ramp was provided at the changeover point and the driver steered so as to descend on to the rails. The road wheels had to be raised manually and locked; the process took about five minutes. There were separate transmission gear boxes for road and rail with a faster ratio on the rail system. On 22 January 1931 there was a press demonstration, then the vehicle entered ordinary service between the Welcombe Hotel near Stratford and Stratford station, by road, and from there it ran by rail to Blisworth.

It was modified in 1932, with pneumatic wheel jacks and a reduction in weight to about 6 tons.

The vehicle was prone to failure and had difficulties on gradients; it was not able to run on a fast main line so passengers still needed to change at the main line junction. It ceased to run from 2 July 1932, being regarded as an unsuccessful experiment, and the journey was replaced by a steam train connecting with taxis in the ordinary way.

Broom Junction was awkwardly laid out for the dominant mineral traffic heading from Northamptonshire towards South Wales, as it required reversal at the station. Engines working through required to turn on the turntable. On 28 September 1942 a south curve was opened by the LMS enabling direct running without entering Broom station. The SMJR passenger service between Stratford and Broom was closed temporarily on 16 June 1947, and the closure was made final on 23 May 1949.

Nationalisation
At the beginning of 1948 the railways of Great Britain were once again reorganised compulsorily by Government; this time they were taken into national ownership, as British Railways. As a result, the management of the SMJR line was divided organisationally between the London Midland Region and the Western Region: the boundary was at Fenny Compton.

Local passenger services in thinly populated rural areas had long been hit hard by more efficient road bus operations, and the new British Railways management, under pressure to reduce losses, looked hard at the value for money of the SMJR passenger work. The passenger service over the northward spur to the Great Central line, Byfield to Woodford Halse, ceased to have a passenger service from 31 May 1948.

In 1950 they reported that passenger bookings between Blisworth and Stratford were two per day, from Ettington one per month, and from Kineton one per day. It was obvious that the passenger service would have to close, and the last passenger train ran on 5 April 1952. The goods service continued until 1965. The Banbury to Towcester and Blisworth service closed earlier on 2 July 1951, followed soon by the goods service on that route, on 29 October 1951.

Conversely the core SMJR route had a strategic, long-distance potential, and from 4 June 1951 four through freight trains each way daily were routed from the Great Central line at Woodford to Broom South Junction, continuing through Ashchurch to South Wales.

The line between Ravenstone Junction and Towcester closed after 8 June 1958.

After the initial opening of the East and West Junction line, the layout at Fenny Compton placed the two railways side by side, with only a siding connection for exchange of goods wagons between the two. The SMJR line crossed over the GWR by a bridge further south. On 7 March 1960 however a new junction was installed at the station, providing a shorter route for iron ore trains from Banbury to South Wales than the former route by way of Leamington. A new staging yard was provided at Honeybourne West Junction.

The connection at Fenny Compton was commissioned on 7 March 1960. A new south facing curve at Stratford was opened on 13 June 1960, as part of the same scheme. Line and signalling improvements had been implemented in addition. However the Oxfordshire Ironstone Company's operations did not have a long life, closing down completely at Banbury on 2 October 1967.

During 1964 and 1965 all the residual local traffic was closed down and through transits were diverted away. The only remaining operational part of the former SMJR system was the connection from Fenny Compton to Kineton Ministry of Defence Establishment. The branch stub was transferred to the Ministry of Defence on 19 July 1971, and is worked by them with their own locomotives.

Locomotives
The Northampton and Banbury Junction Railway ordered four locomotives for the start of its service, from Neilson of Glasgow. However it was unable to produce the cash to pay for them. In difficulty, the N&BJR hired in two locomotives from I W Boulton. One was ex-LNWR No. 1125, a 2-2-2 of 1866: it was in very poor condition, as the other engine, The Owl, about which little detail is recorded. The arrangements actually made are unknown, until 1866 when the LNWR worked the line until 1872. From that year the N&BJR acquired three engines second hand from the LNWR and worked its own trains the engines were a Tayleur 0-6-0 LNWR No. 1827, a Sharp, Stewart 0-4-2T No. 1831, and a Hawthorn 0-6-0 No. 1849. By 1876 the N&BJR was unable to continue working its own trains and the LNWR stepped in once again.

The East and West Junction Railway started its basic train service with the 1866 Manning Wardle 0-6-0ST used by the contractor in the construction of the line. In 1873 six locomotives were ordered on the hire purchase system from Beyer, Peacock and Company; the Birmingham Railway Carriage and Wagon Company provided the financing. After about a year in service, the E&WJR was unable to keep up the payments and the locomotives were repossessed. Two second hand engines were now acquired, brought from France by the contractor Crampton. They were in very poor condition but they worked on the lines for some time. In 1875 two 0-6-0ST locomotives were hired in from I. W. Boulton.

In 1876 the E&WJR acquired two Fairlie locomotives that had been built for a Mexican Railway; one was a double Fairlie 0-6-6-0 and became No. 1; the other was an 0-4-4T and became No. 2. They were disposed of in 1878, and some unknown engines were hired in from I. W. Boulton.

In 1879 an 0-6-0ST was supplied by Beyer Peacock, allocated E&WJR No. 1, the third to bear the number, to work to Broom, but its water tank capacity proved too small and it was sold on. Nos. 2, 3 and 4 were Beyer Peacock double-framed 0-6-0s built in 1880, 1881 and 1885. Nos. 5 and 6 followed from Beyer, Peacock, but were 2-4-0Ts for passenger traffic, and were fitted with Westinghouse brake.

In August 1888 a 2-4-0T was acquired second hand from the Potteries, Shrewsbury and North Wales Railway; it was named Hope and became the fourth No. 1 on the line, working on the Broom route. Three more second-hand engines were bought from the LNWR in December 1891; they were DX class 0-6-0 goods engines and worked between Olney and Broom.

Next came three 0-6-0s from Beyer Peacock, numbered 10 11 and 12; they were fitted with dual brakes. No. 13 was a 2-4-0 express engine from Beyer, Peacock, in 1903. Five more Beyer, Peacock 0-6-0s followed (Nos. 14 to 18) in quick succession, ordered by the E&WJR but financed at the end by the formation of the SMJR. Finally the SMJR ordered a second hand Stroudley "Large C" class 0-6-0 from the LBSCR; built in 1884 it arrived in November 1920.

The Edge Hill Light Railway acquired two LBSCR Terrier 0-6-0Ts and one or other of them, regarded as spare by the Edge Hill Railway, was occasionally put on passenger trains on the Broom line.

When the LMS absorbed the SMJR line, most of the locomotive stock was soon classified as life expired, and in due course Midland Railway pattern 0-6-0 types became dominant. When the Ro-railer was taken off the Welcombe Hotel run, three 0-4-4T engines were brought in to operate on the line. Former Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway engines worked in from Northampton in this period.

The improvements made to the track by the LMS aided the engine power situation considerably as heavier types could be used, and in fact after 1945 the former War Department Austerity 2-8-0 class were commonly used on the line, as well as other heavy types.

Description of a ride on the line
In August 1955 a writer took a footplate ride on a goods train along the SMJR line from Towcester to Stratford. The journey took five hours for thirty or so miles. Although the passenger service was no more, the line was remarkably busy, and the relative infrequency of passing places made progress slow.

The train left Towcester punctually at 10.12 am hauled by a class "4F" 0-6-0 with 19 wagons and a brake van. An eastbound train crossed at Towcester station.

"'A run of about ten minutes with speed round about 20 m.p.h. [30 km/h] brought the train into Blakesley, where... [a] stop of five minutes was made to allow another eastbound train to pass... The next section is a long one, reaching to Woodford Halse... A steady climb, at places 1 in 100, brings the railway to Woodford, and for a short while it runs close to the Marylebone main line, until it crosses it a few hundred yards south of Woodford Halse Station. Exchange sidings are provided here with the former Great Central line, and the passenger service used to run in and out of the passenger station on the main line.'"

At Woodford, a wagon was left and another picked up.

"'The train then drew forward to await the arrival from Stratford of the crew who were to work it on. Most day rotas change here, the Northampton men working a train back over the eastern part of the line, and the Stratford men returning to the west... the Stratford freight was very late in arriving, and [our train] had to wait a full hour before proceeding on its way. A train of 20 empties ran through without stopping... to be followed a few minutes later by another [engine] and 12 wagons, manned by the Stratford crew. Once the train had run in, the two crews quickly changed locomotives, and in a few minutes both were once again on their way.'"

A wagon was picked up at Byfield.

"'Occasional excursions are still run from this station to London via Blisworth... At Byfield Ironstone Sidings another stop was made beside the ground frame, and 15 empties were shunted on to one of the sidings to be filled with ore. This left only six wagons to continue the journey.'"

The train arrived at Fenny Compton and there was a half hour delay until an engine with two brake vans arrived from the section ahead. The writer's train ran the next mile or two to Burton Dassett.

"'The large W.D. [War Department] depot here brings a good deal of traffic to this section, and after a lengthy halt outside the yard instructions were given to run through and reverse into the sidings. Three small W.D. tank [engines] were in evidence... Once the local freight was clear of the line, a heavy W.D. special backed slowly out of the depot yards and on to the running line. This train consisted of 35 wagons, and was... soon on its way westward to Stratford and beyond... The line was now clear for shunting, but such is the layout here that it was quite a complicated business to pick up eight wagons and detach one. However, the job was completed eventually, and the train remarshalled, though a further wait was necessary until the 1.15 p.m. from Stratford arrived. This train of 21 wagons... reached Burton Dassett considerably behind schedule, and after one hour spent in the sidings here [our train] left on the last stage of its journey at 2.30 p.m.'"

At Kineton a wagon was to be picked up. Five hours after leaving Towcester, the train arrived at Stratford Old Town Station...

Topography
Northampton and Banbury Junction Railway

 * Blisworth; opened 1 May 1866; closed 7 April 1952; the main line station continued in use until 4 January 1960;
 * Tiffield; open from October 1869; closed after February 1871;
 * Towcester; opened 1 May 1866; closed 7 April 1952;
 * Green's Norton Junction; divergence of E&WJR line from 1873 until 1919 when point of junction altered to Towcester station;
 * Wappenham; opened 1 June 1872; closed 2 July 1951;
 * Helmdon; opened 1 June 1872; renamed Helmdon Village 1950; closed 2 July 1951;
 * Cockley Brake Junction; joined line to Banbury.

East and West Junction Railway, including the Evesham, Redditch and Stratford-upon-Avon Junction Railway

 * Green's Norton Junction; above;
 * Blakesley; opened 1 July 1873; closed 1 August 1877; reopened 2 March 1885; closed 7 April 1952;
 * Morton Pinkney; opened 1 July 1873; closed 1 August 1877; reopened 2 March 1885; closed 7 April 1952;
 * Woodford West Junction; trailing junction for spurs from GCR main line 1899 to 1965;
 * Byfield; opened 1 July 1873; closed 1 August 1877; reopened 2 March 1885; closed 7 April 1952;
 * Fenny Compton; line opened 5 June 1871 and probably used GWR station; own station opened 1 July 1873; closed 1 August 1877; reopened 2 March 1885; closed 7 April 1952;
 * North End; opened from August 1872; closed 1 August 1877;
 * Burton Dassett Junction; divergence of Edge Hill Light Railway 1920 to 1925;
 * Warwick Road; opened December 1871; closed June 1873 or later; Burton Dassett on same site: station for Army camp not in public timetable, open from 1 December 1909 until 1912, and from 1933 to 1946;
 * Kineton; opened 5 June 1871; closed 1 August 1877; reopened 2 March 1885; closed 7 April 1952;
 * Ettington; opened 1 July 1873; closed 1 August 1877; reopened 2 March 1885; closed 7 April 1952;
 * Stratford Old Town; often alternatively spelt Stratford-upon-Avon; divergence of E&WJR spur to GWR line 1873 to 1965, and of BR spur southwards 1960 to 1965; line from Fenny Compton opened 1 July 1873; closed 1 August 1877; reopened 2 June 1879 as terminus of new service from Broom Junction; original service restored 2 March 1885; closed 7 April 1952; at some times known as Stratford-on-Avon New Street;
 * Binton; opened 2 June 1879; closed 16 June 1947;
 * Bidford; opened May 1881; renamed Bidford-on-Avon 1 July 1909; closed 19 February 1917; reopened 1 January 1919; closed 16 June 1947; the 1947 closure was stated to be temporary, owing to the fuel crisis but the station never reopened;
 * Broom East Junction; divergence of southwards LMS spur 1942 to 1962;
 * Broom Junction; convergence with Evesham and Redditch Railway northwards.

Stratford-upon-Avon, Towcester and Midland Junction Railway

 * Towcester; above;
 * Stoke Bruern; opened 1 December 1892; closed after last train on 30 March 1893 "owing to intervention of Easter";
 * Roade Junction; spur to Roade LNWR;
 * Salcey Forest; opened 1 December 1892; closed after last train on 30 March 1893 "owing to intervention of Easter";
 * Ravenstone Wood Junction; convergence with line from Northampton to Bedford.

The lines were undulating with ruling gradients of about 1 in 80 and lengthy climbs averaging 1 in 100. There was a significant summit at Tiffield between Blisworth and Towcester; again approaching Morton Pinkney, near Byfield and near Fenny Compton; and at Ettington Lime Works, a mile west of Ettington station. he line to Ravenstone Wood Junction was also undulating at 1 in 100 with a mile of 1 in 82, and the Midland Railway section onward to Olney fell at 1 in 75 and 1 in 70 for four miles. The Cockley Brake line climbed continuously to a summit a mile east of Cockley Brake, the final ascent being over a mile of 1 in 65, followed by a fall of over a mile at 1 in 70.

SMJR today
Today the only part of the former SMJR network still open is the 5 mi section between Fenny Compton and the Ministry of Defence depot, Kineton.


text:
Mitsuzo Sasaki

Mitsuzo Sasaki (佐々木 味津三) was a Japanese writer. His Umon Detective Story (右門捕物帖) stories were adapted into a series of films by Toho in the 1950s.

He was born in Shitara, Aichi.

title: Mitsuzo Sasaki


text:
Talk:Water pipe

Water pipe is measured by its OD in the UK. Is this true for elsewhere?

Yes it is.

no it isnt

In Ontario, Canada waterpipe (more commonly refered to as watermain) is measured using the inner diameter of the pipe. Metric is commonly used on blueprints, but English measurments still have their place (and supporters) on the jobsite. For example, 8" PVC watermain would be shown on the engineering blueprints as 203MM, while 6" sanitary/utility PV C would be shown as 150MM, a 2.4MM discrepancy that is understood and accepted given the non exacting tolerances than can be worked with in the industry. Markca 08:06, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

I have added ductile iron as a type of watermain, and added the more common PVC abbreviation to describe poly vinyl chloride Markca 23:54, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

In general, in large diameter supply or waste pipe, ID is used as an engineering specification to express actual volume handling need, but building code often requires something different. There are many custom pipe connecting schemes, and pipe surface and operating pressure can vastly affect liquid transfer capability. However, as in the article, when it is specified that a given type of has equal OD and different wall thickness, the volume of liquid that it contains statically is a simple mathematical formula not influenced by any other factor, and needs no citation. So, the statement that a 1/2" OD pipe with one wall thickness potentially contains more water than one with a thicker wall is a purely logical inference requiring no citation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.32.132.199 (talk) 07:01, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Threading vs flanging
Where is the transition point between pipe threading and pipe flanging, where there is a ring or lip at the pipe end, and which is bolted to the next pipe end? Is use of flanges based on pipe size, pressure, or some other reason? -- DMahalko (talk) 14:29, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

title: Talk:Water pipe