Commons:Categories for discussion/2021/07/Category:British Rail Mk3 coaches of Virgin Trains West Coast

Category:British Rail Mk3 coaches of Virgin Trains West Coast

Duplicate of Category:British Rail Mk3 coaches of Virgin Trains. YTRK (talk) 09:15, 22 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Is it a duplicate or a subset? Virgin operate more lines than just the West Coast. Do they have Mk 3 loco-hauled stock in use elsewhere? Andy Dingley (talk) 09:49, 22 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- w:Virgin CrossCountry and w:Virgin Trains East Coast operated Mk3s in HST sets, so both yes and no depending on what you consider "loco-hauled". That said, as Category:British Rail Mk3 coaches of Virgin CrossCountry is not in Category:British Rail Mk3 coaches of Virgin Trains, and Category:British Rail Class 221s of Virgin Trains West Coast (the only other class that had both Virgin Trains and Virgin CrossCountry categories) doesn't exist, the category is in its current state a duplicate.--YTRK (talk) 13:15, 22 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  - Virgin Trains is a complicated set of categories. I think Virgin CrossCountry and Virgin West Coast were originally separate categories as they were separate franchises. After CrossCountry was refranchised to Arriva, 'Virgin Trains' only had the single franchise and so many people thought it was interchangeable with 'Virgin West Coast'. Then along came VIrgin Trains East Coast...

In my mind 'Virgin Trains' should be a parent of the other three. Whatever we do, it needs to be reflected across all the Virgin rolling stock categrories. Geof Sheppard (talk) 16:48, 22 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Mattbuck:

Hmm. It does seem that you're right. The articles on Wikipedia seems to have gone the same path, and a look on their websites through waybackmachine revealed that Virgin West Coast and Virgin CrossCountry shared the same website under the name Virgin Trains, with their separate names nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile though, when Virgin Trains East Coast started its operations, Virgin West Coast kept the plain Virgin Trains brand to itself, with Virgin Trains East Coast having its own branding and website.

What with the high level of integration between Virgin West Coast and Virgin CrossCountry and the difficulty in distinguishing their rolling stock, an umbrella category would indeed come in handy. Whether it's better to include Virgin Trains East Coast is debatable, and how to treat that umbrella category could be a tricky question.

As for the latter part, I couldn't agree with you more.--YTRK (talk) 10:22, 23 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@YTRK, Andy Dingley, and Geof Sheppard: Has this been resolved at this point so we can close this? Josh (talk) 01:04, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

As no one ahd other suggestions I have made the change as discussed - British Rail Mk3 coaches of Virgin Trains now has three subcategories for the three franchises. I think I picked up all the other related categories but someone might want to check. Geof Sheppard (talk) 16:46, 5 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]