How this is written

What This Publication Promises About Its Own Writing

Four rules, all of them checkable by a reader. They exist because a publication about somebody else's workplace has more ways to be quietly dishonest than most, and stating the rules is cheaper than being trusted on faith.

One: corrections are dated, not quietly made

If something here is wrong, it gets corrected and the correction gets a line at the foot of the page saying what changed and on what date. Nothing is edited silently.

This matters more than it sounds. A publication that fixes errors invisibly is a publication whose whole archive is unverifiable, because you can never tell whether the page you are reading is what it said last year. Dating a change costs one line.

If you point something out and it turns out not to be wrong, you get a reply explaining why rather than silence. That is slower and more useful.

Two: no structure is named by its own name

No bridge, dock, terminal, park, pier or building on this site is called by its own name. Places are given by type and by street: the lift span at such a street, the stone berth on such a bank, the viaduct sidewalk above such a junction.

There are two reasons and both are practical.

Most of these names belong to companies, past or present. A publication with no relationship to a company should not be printing that company's name as though it had one, and a reader should not have to work out whether a name on a page is a fact or an endorsement. The rule removes the question.

The second reason is that a street is more useful than a name anyway. A name you have to look up tells you nothing about where to go. A street tells you where to go.

The cost is that the writing is occasionally clumsier than it would otherwise be. That is an acceptable price.

Three: the photographs are illustrative, and this is the important one

Every photograph on this site shows the type of structure being described. None of them is documentation of a named object, and no caption claims otherwise.

This has to be said out loud, because a publication that writes in the first person about standing in a specific place, next to a picture of a structure, is inviting a reader to assume the picture is a record of that place. It is not. The plates exist to show what a self unloading boom is, what a counterweight track looks like, what a street end with no sidewalk looks like. They are illustrations of a type.

That is also why the rule in section two extends to the pictures. A frame is never captioned with a name, and every caption says what kind of thing is in it rather than which one.

If you want a record of a particular structure, the correct sources are the engineering and historical records held publicly, not a publication's illustrations.

Four: what is never published here

• Reviews, ratings, testimonials and awards. There are none that would survive a question, and inventing them is the oldest trick in this business. So the site has no such block at all rather than an empty one.
• Prices. This publication does not publish prices for anything, including the one thing on the site that is somebody else's service. What the flight search shows is the booking service's own display, and it is theirs.
• Vessel names, company names, operator names. Same rule as structures, same reasons.
• A schedule of openings. Nobody has one. Publishing a guess would be the single most useful sounding and most dishonest thing this site could do.
• Any place that requires passing a gate or standing on an operating dock. Described nowhere, and a page elsewhere that describes them is asking you to trespass.
• Any claim of association with a dock operator, vessel owner, mill, transport company or public body. There is none.

Where the money comes in

Stated here as well as on about and in the disclaimer, because a standards page that leaves out the revenue is not a standards page.

One arrangement exists. A flight search, run by an outside booking service, appears on three pages. A booking made with that service after using it can pay this publication a commission. Nothing else earns anything, no article contains an affiliate link, and no writing on this site has been influenced by that arrangement, which is easy to verify because the arrangement has nothing to do with dock machinery.

The line at the foot of a page

When a page has been corrected it carries a line like this at the bottom:

Corrected on a stated date: what was wrong, and what it now says.

There are no such lines yet, because this publication is new and nothing has needed one. When there are, they stay permanently.