FROGRAIL 
    
About Frograil
History
Objectives
Organization
Webmaster
I've
been a passive railfan since I was born -- I've always loved trains. How
can you not? In August of 1970, I became an active railfan. Between
1970 and 1989 I had jobs that required travel fairly often, so one project
connected with each trip, if possible, was to get trackside whenever possible.
That was a problem -- a major problem. There was no Internet, and very few
printed guides to railfan locations were around. One had to get a map and
try to guess where you could see some trains. Sometimes you did really
well, but you could also get completely skunked, trying to find locations that
no longer even had rails, let alone an active mainline.
One
exception was a regular column in Extra 2200 South which was written by
Bill Hughes. He covered major cities and, all things considered, his
efforts collectively represented probably the best railfan location guide you
could find. After I got my first personal computer in 1982, I set up a
simple database to keep track of railfan locations mentioned in Extra 2200
South, Trains, Model Railroad, etc. The state, city,
railroad, magazine month and date were all entered. That soon proved
overly burdensome, because there were stacks of magazines all over the place.
Then I started ripping up the mags -- throwing 99% of the stuff away, and
putting the pages containing railfan locations info into 3-ring binders.
The pages were simply numbered sequentially, and that page number was the only
thing needed in the database (besides the info about the location for sorting
purposes).
The
system was a good one, but was sterile, in that the primitive databases
available back then had very restrictive commenting functionality. There
was no way to type in driving directions, photographic considerations, etc.,
without creating an impossible to control administrative burden.
In
1990-1991, Tim Berners-Lee made the most important contribution to railfans that
was made in the Twentieth Century. He invented the World Wide Web.
The combination of Microsoft's (and Apple's) graphical user interface and the
visual dexterity of Web pages was an explosion waiting to happen. It took
a few years, but the explosion has definitely taken place. There is more
railfan information on the Net than anyone ever dreamed possible. In 1998,
I enrolled in a class to learn HTML so I could write my own pages. I had
absolutely no clue about HTML, but I knew exactly what shape my web was going to
take: It was to be a railfan location guide.
In
February of 1998, a very modest several pages were posted to my local ISP's
hosting space -- I was a published Webmaster! There was a home page and a
separate page for each state (or at least a few, as it was to take quite a while
before all the states and Canadian provinces were given their separate pages).
As I added railfan locations and kept making the site better, I got an e-mail
from someone who wanted to contribute some sites. To be honest with you,
that was the first time I ever considered using contributions from anyone other
than myself. By late 2003, there were dozens and dozens of railfan
locations within Frograil that have been contributed by volunteers.
Incidentally, in February 2000, I transferred my Railfan Web site to the brand
new Frograil.com domain.
In
about 2000 or 2001, Henry Mikus and I were both contributing sites along
the NS, ex-Southern Railway, Piedmont Division mainline, which I've always
thought of as the Crescent Route. He suggested we put the sites into the
form of a "tour", whereby a complete stranger to the area could begin at point
A, drive to point B, and then onward. It was a brilliant idea, and began
what has become quite a respectable collection of tours that are within 17
states. Connected tour segments of the CSX ex-SAL mainline from
Wilmington, NC, all the way thru Athens, GA, and the Norfolk Southern from
Seneca, SC, all the way to Washington DC have been completed, as well as many
other, shorter tours.
In
surfing around the Net during the early 2000's, I became quite fond of train
gifs, which are small images drawn to represent prototype railroad equipment.
The train at the top of this page is composed of a few of these gifs.
Chris Denbow, one of the best artists of the genre, was moving on, and was going
to take down his train gifs site. Before doing so, he agreed to let me
host his gifs. I undertook this new, completely different aspect of
Frograil with some misgivings, but I was determined not to let his work
disappear. As had happened with railfan locations in the late 1990's,
other folks started to ask if their work could be displayed on Frograil.
The train gifs pages have really blossomed -- no Web site has nearly the breadth
and depth of the gifs now displayed on Frograil. There are well over 1,000
-- actually, I have no idea how big the number is.
As of
November 2006, it's hard to believe that Frograil is averaging over 1,400
visitors a day, or more than 500,000 visitors a year. It's a huge site,
with hundreds and hundreds of pages, and I have reached about the limit of what
I can take care of decently.
[Rest of page is Under Construction]
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