Welcome to the new Abandoned Rails Website!

(Well, not "new", per se, but rather updated...)

What all has changed? The color scheme is still the same, as you can see. But there have been a number of visual changes to note:

1) URL Formatting: previously, abandoned routes had the url "article.asp?id=363" or "map.asp?c=413". No longer -- each route now has a much more descriptive URL, like "Monterey_Branch" or "Anaheim_to_Santa_Ana". Not only will this encourage more traffic from other sites, but if you want to go straight to the page for the state of New York, just type in "New_York" into your address bar after "abandonedrails.com/".

2) Single Page Presentation: previously, the historical text and pictures were displayed on one page, while the map for the same route was on another page. And if you wanted to see each of the pictures in a "slideshow" fashion, each picture could be seen on its own page as well. But now maps, pictures, historical text, filings and everything else for an abandoned route can be found on a single page.

3) Embedded Slideshow: Instead of loading up the page with all the pictures at once, only a single picture now shows in the "slideshow" area. Each picture shows for 7 seconds before advancing to the next one. Media-style controls allows you to browse through the pictures at their own pace as well. Clicking on a picture will open the original picture for full-size viewing.

4) Widescreen: When I first started Abandoned Rails, the 800x600 screen resolution was the defacto standard resolution for websites, thus I set the width of each page to fit within 800 pixels (page width was set at 760 pixels, actually). Today, 1024x768 is the single most-used screen resolution; indeed, almost 30% of visitors to Abandoned Rails use 1024x768, the most of any one resolution. That, coupled with the fact that I am now displaying all of the information for an abandonment on a single page, led me to widen the default page width to 960 pixels.

4) Faster Load Times: Previously, some pages would take more than a second to load. Now, pages display much faster, within tenths of a second.

That's really the only changes from a user standpoint. Behind the scenes and from a technical standpoint, the entire database has moved over from MySQL to Microsoft SQL Server. The new database allows the use of stored procedures, which contributes to the faster load times of the website. In addition, the entire site has been re-written using ASP.NET; previously I used classic ASP, and the use of ASP.NET now also contributes to the faster processing time.

All in all, I'm pleased with the changes, and should start playing catch-up to all the abandoned routes that have been emailed to me during this time. But the changes are far from over. My next project is to work on the Abandoned Rails Atlas. Imagine an Atlas that when you click on a blue marker, the abandoned route is shown on the atlas, along with a pop-up information window showing you the historical text, pictures, and filings for that route. You would never have to leave the Atlas, because all of the information is right there. That won't be for a while, though...

I hope you find the new website more useful and gratifying. Please let me know what you think!

Another dry spell at Abandoned Rails?

Not at all! Sure, I haven't posted anything in a while. But that doesn't mean I haven't been hard at work on the website. Far from it, actually.

Within the next few weeks, be on the lookout for some major changes. I don't want to spill the beans just yet, but they are quite significant. Everything you've come to expect from this website will still be there, of course. But it will certainly look different. And behave different. On the flip side, all of this redesign is taking me away from posting to the site, but that doesn't stop people from emailing me. As soon as I finish the rewrite and get back to posting, expect the floodgates to be opened. (And as I foresee, this new redesign will help make it much easier for me to update the site...)

Honda Motor Company, as a measure of staying both competitive and contemporary, redesigns their Accord model line every four years, on the dot. Even if the car is a phenomenal success, you can bet that Honda is going to completely redesign the whole thing in 4 years. I've had the current website design and layout since 2006. I believe it is time for a change.

http://www.abandonedrails.com/gallery.asp?t=2&id=524

I’ve divided the filings from the regular content, so scroll down to the new "Other Abandoned Routes" section, and you’ll see a nice long list of ICC filings. (Look for the icon that looks like a scroll, they’re hard to miss!) Click on one, and that will take you to the information about the filing, along with an appeal to supply further information about the route either via email or by leaving a comment. The filings are also available on the State pages, such as Kansas:

http://www.abandonedrails.com/gallery.asp?t=1&id=16

As I’m working through the AT&SF filings right now, the only states that will have filings will be those in which the AT&SF ran, of course. I have about 150 filings to go (I think), so once I finish with those, I will move on to a railroad in the eastern part of the US, perhaps the B&O.

Anyway, introducing these filing records onto Abandoned Rails has given me a chance to address the other "unknown" abandoned routes (about 20 of them). If you don’t recall, the site also listed a couple of routes that were "unknown", mainly in South Carolina, that were known abandoned routes, but for which I had no information to present on the website. I now present these in the same manner as the filings (sans the filing information), to allow visitors to add comments about the line. Hopefully if enough people leave comments on a particular line, I can actually create an article from them, but we’ll see.

Back to the filings, a concern of mine which arises by adding these filings is that, with probably close to a thousand filings to add, I’m afraid that I will be presenting too much information at once. I haven’t added these filings to the Atlas yet, but when I do, you can expect that there will be a large number of blue markers all over the map, probably to the point of slowing down the responsiveness of the Atlas so as to make it virtually unusable. My thinking is that I will add different atlases, one that shows only abandoned rails articles (as it does today), and another that will show only filings. (By the way, for those of you using Internet Explorer, the Atlas has been fixed. As I use Firefox almost exclusively, sometimes I forget to check the "other" browser to ensure that my site works in it also. Which is important, considering that almost 70% of my visitors use IE, but I digress.)

If you're still awake, be on the lookout for more filings to be added for AT&SF in the coming days (or weeks). Adding a single filing takes only a couple of minutes, so hopefully getting through all those filings won’t take long. And of course, I will still keep updating the site with articles, maps, and such, it is just a matter of balancing the workload. And quite a workload it is!

I'm sure that all railfans have heard of the STB. The Surface Transportation Board, part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, is the governing body of railroad activity and commerce within the United States. Of interest to visitors of Abandoned Rails, it is also the governing body that provides regulatory oversight on railroad abandonments within this country. They are the ultimate authority. If you are looking for information about the abandonment of any line in the U.S., their library is full of abandonment proceedings and judgments for all railroad abandonments.

If you have the time to go through them.

You see, most of this information is stored on paper within the library itself. Entry into the library is free; or for a small copying fee, you can request written documents be sent to you. But how do you know what to look for?

Fear not! I am proud to say that the STB Library has gotten in touch with me and is now sending me the docket number catalog for every ICC abandonment filing since 1920! All the big railroads are here: AT&SF, BN, SP, UP, PRR, C&O, B&O, CRI&P... and all of the lines they have abandoned (up until the 1980s) are now at my disposal, with more railroads on the way. Each abandonment comes with a docket number, and with that docket number, you can go to the STB with confidence and research until your heart's content! Each abandonment docket will be indexed in the same way that abandoned routes are today on Abandoned Rails: by state and by railroad. An atlas of these abandonments are even in the works so you can see what lines near you were abandoned long ago — possibly even lines you didn't know existed!

As of now, I am entering these docket numbers into the Abandoned Rails database — there are a lot of them! Once they're in the database, I will begin working on posting them to the site for your perusal. I am very excited about this opportunity, and hope that you are, too!

First off, I wish upon everyone the best of the new year!

I'm sure that most, if not all, of you use online maps and satellite imagery to find and track abandoned railroad routes. And there are a number of good tools out there for doing so -- the tools of my choice are Google Maps and Acme Mapper. And I'm sure that some of you probably use the maps on the Abandoned Rails website for your own reference. When I first started mapping abandoned routes, there were (and still are) three different kinds of maps that one can use:

Google Maps/Earth (or any online mapping website)
Satellite imagery
USGS Topographical Maps

Each offers their own benefits, of course, but each also have their own drawbacks. My intent with the abandoned route maps I present on the website was to show accurate routings and artifacts of abandoned railroad routes. The routing of an abandoned line may be obvious on all three mediums above, but the artifacts of a line are most likely not as obvious, except for on the Topo maps. For example, Google Maps may just show a railroad line running through a small town; the corresponding satellite image would show the distinct signs of an abandoned railroad route along the same path. The Topo map, however, will show perhaps a parallel siding or two within the town, and also any railroad-related structures nearby, such as a water tower. I would be hard-pressed to discern either the sidings or the water tower in Maps or satellite imagery, but they are clearly marked on a Topo map. In other cases, Google Maps may not even show the line, when both the satellite imagery and the Topo map indicate that a railroad line once ran through town. In the opposite case, Google Maps may show a railroad line, but there is no evidence of the line in satellite imagery due to urban developments along the right-of-way, or satellite imagery may not be available for that area; the line continues to show in Topo maps, however. In extreme cases, an abandoned line may not show up in any of the three mediums, if it has been abandoned long enough. Here again, though, the Topo map proves the most useful, as a trained eye can trace abandoned routes by following the contour lines imposed on the Topo map where the drawn line itself is otherwise absent; indeed, I have resorted to this method on a number of maps on my website.

What I'm getting at here is that, among the three mapping mediums I use, I find the USGS Topo maps to be the most useful as far as accuracy and consistency are concerned. The USGS has certainly striven for detailed accuracy when they produce their maps, and I feel that these "official" maps are the best to use when tracing an abandoned railroad right-of-way. Thus, I use topographical maps for roughly 90% of the routes I draw for the website. Using these Topo maps, I am able to depict such artifacts as passing sidings, small 3-4 track yards, and other artifacts/landmarks that may be of interest to the abandoned railroad hunter. In addition, Topo maps indicate ownership alongside the line, which is helpful in historical research.

This is all well and good. But, as expected, some problems do arise from my almost exclusive use of Topo maps. First, in my experience in tracing routes, there are numerous discrepancies between Google Maps, satellite imagery, and Topo maps. For example, the Topo map may show an abandoned route running north-south through a small town, the satellite imagery may show the same line but offset by up to 100 feet to the west, and Google Maps may show bends and curves in the line where both satellite imagery and the Topo maps show a straight right-of-way. How are these differences resolved? Some may suggest that the abandoned route depicted in the satellite image is correct, since it most definitely shows where the route once traveled. To add to the confusion, the Topo map and satellite imagery may BOTH be correct: the Topo map shows the location of the line when the map was rendered, typically in the mid-1980s, whereas the satellite image may show the location of the line from much more recently (within the last couple of years). Who's to say that the line was not relocated during this time? Second, the Abandoned Rails website does not show Topo maps, but rather Google Maps, so when I trace a line using a Topo map, it may not necessarily coincide with the railroad line pre-drawn on the Google Map, and this will certainly lead to confusion on the part of some visitors.

A short aside: Frankly, I do not know how Google Maps gets the railroad lines that it draws on their maps. When tracing a route just recently, I found that the railroad route drawn by Google Maps had two 90-degree turns, each within 20 feet of each other. This is obviously an error, and quite comical to imagine, but I digress.

Despite these differences, I choose to use USGS Topographical Maps to trace routes for Abandoned Rails. While this leads to discrepancies in the way routes are presented on Abandoned Rails (my own tracing versus the Google Maps pre-drawn tracing), I feel that my rendering is the more correct routing. One final consideration: one thing to love technology is that if you don't like something now, it will be better soon. Better mapping technologies are constantly emerging, and it is hard not to suspect that perhaps the pre-drawn routing of railroads on Google Maps will soon become more accurate, even to the point of matching my own routing!

The Abandoned Rails website received its first Internet hit on August 30, 2005 (from me). It was a simple site then, with only two or three static pages containing some text and a few pictures. In the first weeks after, the only hits on the site were mostly from me, as I was testing out different colors on the site, and trying out different layouts and arrangements. Within about six months, hits on the site barely counted 10 per day. Considering that was probably only .0001% of total global Internet traffic on a given day (if that, even), I didn't think too much about it; after all, I didn't have much content up -- the site now only had about 15 pages, and all of them were from my own information.

Today, over 4 years later, things have changed. The site now averages 240 unique visitors each day. On average, each visitor visits 12 pages, meaning Abandoned Rails serves almost 3,000 pages daily. According to an anonymous traffic reporting website, this puts Abandoned Rails in the top 20% of most-visited sites on the Internet. While that seems impressive, I should also mention, that, in the grand scheme of things, there are approximately 160,000 websites that get more traffic than Abandoned Rails. But that also means that my site gets more traffic than 640,000 other websites out there. These are rough numbers, of course, but still worthy of consideration.

I'm happy with the "20%" ranking. What is even more exciting is that the average hits per day is growing: 6 months ago, the site was at about 200 visitors per day, 1 year ago saw about 125 visitors per day. Looks like the site has doubled its visits since this time last year.

All this to say to keep sending in your contributions, and hopefully as the site continues to grow, so to will its readership, and thus also the oft disregarded pastime of abandoned railroad hunting!

Google Maps is an indispensable tool useful in a lot of areas of life. Not the least of which is mapping out railroad routes. But after a railroad has been abandoned for a while, the railroad line ceases to appear on Google Maps, and this has sometimes made it difficult to find that long-lost right-of-way.

I have noticed lately, however, that Google seems to have started demarcating property lines on their maps. What does this mean to the casual online railfan? Well, since the land of abandoned railroad lines are still retained by their owners, the boundaries of that property are now indicated in Google Maps! So now, in some areas, finding that old abandoned route is easier.

Allow me to demonstrate using an existing article on my website, that of the Whittier Branch. Let's take a look at this area in Google Maps:

Google Map of Whittier, CA

Looking at the middle of the map, two gray parallel lines are visible as they run from top to bottom. Those lines mark the boundary of a small narrow property, and what other uses does a small, long, narrow property have other than railroads? That is in fact the former routing of the Whittier Branch! Following these lines to the south, they run adjacent to the Presbyterian Community Hospital turning to the southeast, cross Washington Boulevard, then make a 90-degree turn to the southwest, crossing Lambert Road and finally connecting with an existing railroad track near Slauson Avenue. This map confirms the routing I had estimated when originally plotting the Whittier Branch for my website back in January of this year.

Looking over other cities and towns in Google Maps, other parallel lines of this nature can be easily seen -- abandoned routes galore! So, fellow railfans, next time you need to find a map of an abandoned railroad route, Google Maps should definitely be one of your first stops, if it isn't already! (No, I do not work for Google or receive any monetary compensation from them! :) )

As the regular visitor might have noticed, I am not updating the website as frequently as I normally do. According to the previous blog post, I took a long break over summer while I tended to a busy life. Once summer was over, I was able to start posting regularly again, which I enjoyed.

But now, activity on the website has slowed down to almost nothing again, but this time for a different and unfortunate reason.

Without getting too specific, a member of my family was recently diagnosed with cancer. And since my wife and I are the only family around (others are in California and Georgia, while we're here in Texas), it has been up to us to tend to her care during her treatment and recovery. As anybody who has cancer or who has cared for somebody with cancer knows, this is a full time job. And since my wife and I both already have full time jobs, I'm sure you can imagine that there just isn't enough time for much else. So we've each had to put on hold our respective lives so that we can care for our afflicted.

I would ask that you please keep my family in your thoughts and prayers during this time; cancer notwithstanding, keep checking back to the website, because, every so often, I might actually have time to post something!

Regular visitors have probably noticed that not a lot of content was posted in the past couple of months. I think the last time I was regularly updating the site was back in May. Only a couple of updates were made in June and August, and I don't think I updated the site even ONCE during July.

Summer was a busy time for me. A lot of stuff was going on, and I rarely found time for myself, let alone my website. However, submissions to the site have been coming in at a regular rate, which means I have a lot of updating to do! This is a good thing, of course, but it also seems that I may never catch up now. I think I may just filter through and get to the big stuff first, and then possibly come back and work on the odds and ends that have been submitted.

It has also been a good thing, because, despite my hectic schedule over summer, I was able to take a break from maintaining/updating the website. It has given me an opportunity to take a step back and re-evaluate some things. Before, I was accepting pretty much everything given to me. I wasn't filtering anything out, and I think I just got tired of trying to keep up. I think now, for the time being, I may only be posting actual abandoned railroad routes and structures. This will ease the burden on me, and will improve the focus of the website. I have also made some other changes to the administration program I use to add and maintain the website which will make it easier for me to do those tasks.

Anyway, there hasn't been any structural changes to the site as far as the Internet visitor is concerned, but I'm sure I will come up with something shortly.

I am happy to say that Summer Vacation is over, and life is returning back to normal (whatever that means). And, as you may have noticed, I've been regularly posting to the site again. Will I take another long break? Probably, but who knows when?

Just a quick comment about the Comments feature (again). Previously, when a user posted a comment, the comment they just posted was not immediately displayed. Instead, a message indicated to the user that the message would have to be reviewed first before being posted in order to prevent spam.

This is a valid threat, by the way. The Guest Book page is literally inundated with spam messages. Every day. At least two or three an hour. And, as you can imagine, keeping up with and deleting all that spam has proved to be tedious and tiresome. As such, I have provisions in place that has greatly reduced the amount of spam I receive in the Guest Book. Now it is down to just a couple of spam messages a week.

Back to the Comments feature, after entering a comment, the user had to wait until I got around to reviewing the post and then "approving" it. Actually, whenever a Comment is left by a user, I get a text message on my iPhone -- I can then "approve" the message from my iPhone wherever I happen to be (pretty cool, eh?). However, after 6 months of this, I have noticed: spam is NEVER posted to an article. It may be posted to the Guest Book all the time, but never to an article (or map or whatever).

So, I am happy to say that I have lifted the "quarantine" stage of Comments -- that is, when a user enters a Comment for a page and clicks "Save", the Comment is immediately posted and visible on the page. No more waiting! (This does not apply to the Guest Book, unfortunately, as I still have to approve those messages.) So again, I implore you to post Comments, my dear visitors!