On May 9, 11:12*am, Jamie Thompson wrote:
On May 9, 9:47*am, wrote:

On Mon, 9 May 2011 08:18:45 +0100

"Peter Masson" wrote:
Not specifically Irish, but used where the county and a town in it have the
same name, and the shire suffix doesn't apply. The one English example is
County Durham.

Not just counties - why Finchley Central instead of Central Finchley for
example?

B2003

Well, I always assumed that it provides alphabetical grouping in
documentation (and in modern web uses, drop-down lists), and would be
very handy if all stations used that form:
Acton Central,
Acton East,
Acton Mainline,
Acton North,
Acton South,
Acton Town,
Acton West

To a certain extent, I think that the usual convention may have been
that it depended on whether the station was actually named after a
place (for example, there are actually areas shown on the Ordnance
Survey map, not just stations, called North Acton, South Acton, East
Acton and West Acton), or whether the 'north' or 'central' or whatever
was simply added by the railway company to distinguish it from other
stations. Hence Finchley Central, because there isn't such a place as
Central Finchley, it's just the central station for Finchley; as
opposed to East Finchley, which is called that because there is
actually a place called East Finchley.

Then again, for all I know the areas of Acton may have taken their
name from the railways stations, so that might be complete rubbish!

...but it was usually down to the original railway company to do the
naming, hence the variations.

I'm sure there's at least an element of that.

Martin L