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For those curious about the origins and history of the International Railway Links (IRL) from TrainNet.org, here's a little background information on this valuable resource which attracts over 300 hits per day and currently has more than 10,000 entries. The railway and railroad related links on the IRL have always had an international flavor as they include links from countries in Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Europe and Australia.
The original list was a simple ASCII text file created by a CompuServe® TrainNet Forum member in the early 1990's with a handful of entries (web addresses) for railroad sites on the the new World Wide Web. The list was placed in a forum library and other members soon began posting messages with additional addresses on the message boards. Slightly less than a year later, Forum Staff member Dick Beebe took on the task of maintaining the list which had grown to well over 1,000 individual entries. A professional programmer, Dick designed a FoxPro proprietary database system to facilitate storage and updating the list, which was originally done several times a month.
As the list grew to several thousand entries it became obvious that it was very time consuming for members to download and print, so Dick developed a FoxPro driven HTML version to replace the ASCII text list version allowing members to easily download and load it into their web browser as a local file. As the popularity of the World Wide Web grew the TrainNet Forum staff decided to make the list available to more than just CompuServe® members, therefore in December, 1998 the HTML version was moved to an independent web site provided by Forum Administrator Dorr Altizer on his corporate TadLane.com domain. Along with a new title, International Railway Links (IRL), and a search engine provided by Andy Beebe, owner of Maine Web Design, the list became available to everyone on the World Wide Web, whether or not they were CompuServe® members.
In the interest of maintenance efficiency, on 7 June, 2011, the IRL was removed from the TadLane.com domain and merged into the TrainNet.org domain, making it easily acessible from any page via the TrainNet.org standard menu.
The FoxPro database maintenance system eventually became obsolete and was replaced in 2005 with a standard HTML 4.01 based system (that doesn't require proprietary software to maintain) and a new search engine powered by FreeFind. The new system is much faster and easier to use with a typical web browser.
The IRL passed major milestones by reaching 9,000 entries on 5 March, 2009, and then 10,000 entries on 31 May, 2010. Unlike many other link sites on the Web, instead of being categorized or grouped by the subject matter, a method which was deemed inefficient, difficult to use and possibly misleading, the IRL entries are arranged in alphabetic order on separate "pages." To maintain our goal of having the most accurate and up-to-date list of railway links on the planet the IRL Team performs maintenance five days a week (Monday - Friday); this consists of adding new entries, updating existing entries and deleting entries for websites that have gone inactive or been removed from the Web. See the "Recent Additions, Updates & Deletions" links on the IRL home page for details of the daily updates made in the last three months.
Although entries have come from many sources, including a great number of webmasters who provide updated information, special thanks go to Dick Beebe, Robert Saul, Dean Portz, Gerald Kackman and Dan Dawdy who all contributed many entries over the years.
The current IRL Team consists of Team Chief Don Howe, Team Member Becky Morgan supported by TrainNet.org Webmaster Dorr Altizer.
As new entries poured in during the late 1990's several of the TrainNet Forum staff members noted that some web sites were really outstanding in their design, creativity and usefulness. So on 1 July, 1998 we established the Web Gem Award program. From the very beginning, we determined that to receive the Award a site had to meet relatively stringent minimum criteria and be given a high score by a minimum of three members of the staff. Coordinated by Team Chief Becky Morgan, the coveted Award is currently held by 74 sites from around the planet.
