Originally Posted by yyznomad
I also strongly object to a generalized rail forum. For example, in my country, named "Canada" we have one major railline named "VIA Rail" and it's used by millions of people across our pretty big country. Did you know that Canada is really big? Very big. Bigger than the United States. Of course, the top half doesn't really much of anything except for moss, rocks, seals, tundra, and water but that's not the point. Our current forum, namely "Air Canada Aeroplan" is littered here and there with VIA threads. I find these threads useful but a real pain in the butt to search for each time I have a question (rather than starting ANOTHER thread on VIA). In addition, there are very knowledgeable and experience VIA rail travellers that have alot of SPECIFIC and DETAILED information and help to offer others. Thus VIA deserves its own forum.
You recognise that there are rail-specific questions being posted in the wrong place ("littered" in the AC forum), but you don't want a rail-specific forum however you
would support a country-specific rail forum? Sorry, I just don't get that. A generalised rail forum would make searching (if it were needed at all) much easier. That's the whole point: all that wonderful knowledge in one obvious place.
Some rail questions will be specific to operator and route - ticketing, times, seating, fares, stations etc. Some will be as part of a country enquiry - whether rail services exist in a specific country, how they might offer alternative to air travel in that place etc. The latter still sit logically in the destinations fora, while the former belong in a dedicated rail travel forum. If we can choose daily whether a thread is Mileage Run, UA MP, Star Alliance or TravelBuzz then we can choose as above with relative ease, IMHO.