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!