Ohio Valley Railroads

Did you know that Ohio Valley Railroads has its own Flickr group? We’re currently accepting railroad photos from all over the state. Right now we only have 5 members in the group, and I think we can do much better than that!

If your photo is already on Flickr you don’t even have to upload the photo again. Just add it to the group. I’ve put up a few choice shots I’ve taken from around Southwestern and Central Ohio, but I would love to see photos from all over the state. Be sure when you add photos to geotag them so that they show up on the group map.

I was hopeful that tonight I would have a couple shots of Norfolk Southern’s Office Car Special to add to the group. It came through Columbus earlier tonight on the way to the Kentucky Derby, but I missed it. Instead I had to settle with a CSX train I caught in Upper Arlington yesterday as the subject of this post. The quality is not very good, because my DSLR was too big to shoot through the chain-link fence on the pedestrian overpass.

In other news I’m working on an overview of the major Class One subdivisions in Ohio. I’m about half way done so expect to see that in the next week or two.

Anyway, there are some great photos up on the Flickr group. Even if you don’t feel like joining, be sure to check them out!

Welcome Back

First of all, if you’ve visited the site at all in the past 2 weeks I apologise. I committed one of the great sins of web design and worked on my site while it was on a live server. I probably shouldn’t have, but I didn’t want to go through the trouble of setting up a test site.

I also apologise for the downtime. We’ve switched hosts now to NearlyFreeSpeech.net. They’re a unique webhost in the fact that they are “pay-as-you-go”. Like some cell phone plans, this host only charges for resources we use rather than a set $9.99 a month. We’ll see how it works out.

Now that all the administration is out of the way, I’d like to point your attention to our new design. I know it wasn’t too long ago that I updated the design, but I never really liked that last one. The new design is a little more minimalist than some of the previous ones, but it has all the features I need to create a great website. I should know; I coded this design by hand.

New Features

By far the biggest feature of this design is the new Ohio Railroads page. Right now I just have the CL&N up as a place-holder, but eventually I want this to be the focus of the site. I’m going to be less concerned about regular posts and more about creating an accurate database of Ohio’s major (and minor) railroads. It’s going to be quite a task, I’m not going to claim that I’ll have stuff up on every Ohio railroad (there are quite a few), but I’m going to try and write as many short histories and get as many photos up as I can.

Now with the railroad pages as the center of the website I needed a way to spotlight them on the home page. This lead to the “Latest Update” section you should hopefully see below this post. The 3 most recently updated railroads are automatically listed as well as a thumbnail selected from that article. At the moment, with only one article posted, it’s currently displaying the About and Railroad pages, but once more are published these will go away.

Additionally I’ve kept the related posts feature on individual post pages and added a railroad tag cloud to the right-hand column. The tags include both pages and posts that involve the listed railroad.

The was one major feature that didn’t make the cut from the last design, and that was the forum. This made come back someday, but right now I don’t think the demand is there for me to bother with its upkeep.

The Future

In the future I would like to add some sort of interactive map and timeline, but those thoughts still in the concept stage at the moment. Is there anything anyone else out there would like to see on Ohio Valley Railroads?

Thank you for staying with Ohio Valley Railroads through such a crazy time. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe using the links at the top of the right-hand column. Also be sure to check out the Ohio Valley Railroads Facebook Page. We now have 70 fans on Facebook. Once you become a fan you’re welcome to post some feedback on the wall or upload some Ohio Railroad photos to the photo gallery.

One last thing. I’ve tested this site in Firefox 3.6, the latest versions of Chrome, and IE8. If you are having any problems be sure to let me know so I can get them fixed right away.