Talk:Mogadishu–Villabruzzi Railway

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This article lacks sufficient references and/or adequate inline citations.

English and tweaks needed[edit]

A welcome article but it reads very much as a word by word translation from Italian and needs considerable rewriting. Are the Italian references accessible by editors in English-speaking countries? This is the only mention of what I was told in Somalia (although details differ) that the track was lifted by the British to be sent to another theatre of operations and was lost at sea when the ship was torpedoed. The tail of the line in Mogadishu old harbour was in use in the 1960s. The Title would be better as Mogadiscio-Villabruzzi Railway and perhaps even better with the end points in their current names.--SilasW (talk) 17:25, 1 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Relevance of Picture[edit]

The scene of double track near a high steep hill, apparently terraced, raises my doubts which are strengthened by the description of the image:

"This Ansaldo 442 steam locomotive was build in 1938. It is still in use in Eritrea for transporting cargo from the port city of Massawa to the capital Asmara almost 2.5 km higher. It's also used as a tourist attraction as the climb is one of the steepest and most spectacular ones one can make with a steam train in the world."

That has no mention of the Mogadiscio-Villabruzzi Railway. That part of Eritrea is more than a thousand miles as the crow flies from the location of the Somalia line. The article says the British shipped the track to Eritrea (but why? The conquest of Italian East Africa was fairly quick and easy. That might have got the loco from Muqdisho to Eritrea but does not fit what I was told in Somalia that the ship with the tracks was sunk. But then, where could 950mm track have been of use other than in IEA, except as a new wartime supply line in the middling east?

The article says the British shipped some diesel locos to Eritrea.

There are other inconsistencies in the article, for example the southern bridge over the Shebelle was at Afgoi (it became the road crossing when the bridge in the centre of the town was blown up by the Italians). Afgoi is about 30km from Mog and is the only place in the list where the elevation is given in feet then metres rather than metres/feet which suggests it might be a later insertion.--SilasW (talk) 15:48, 8 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Two edits of 3 June 2009[edit]

These edits added new material and so I did not immediately revert them, but from April the rest of the article has been in conventional English. It has now returned to its bashed word by word from Italian style, for example the first sentence says that the subject is the "Railway Mogadishu-Villabruzzi". Might the recent editor consider restoring the English version and add the new information, in place of what is virtually a reversion, perhaps from Italianate English text cached elsewhere.--SilasW (talk) 08:58, 3 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]