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  • Railroad.net Launches Leading News Dest. For The RR Industry

  • General discussion about the RAILROAD.NET site, forums, or content ONLY. Please do not post your general railroading questions, please choose an appropriate forum. For help using the site, please post in the Help Using RAILROAD.NET Forum.
General discussion about the RAILROAD.NET site, forums, or content ONLY. Please do not post your general railroading questions, please choose an appropriate forum. For help using the site, please post in the Help Using RAILROAD.NET Forum.

Moderator: Jeff Smith

 #967521  by Jeff Smith
 
Below is an an announcement from our new owner. I would like to add that I am very excited about the direction railroad.net has been taking. Rest assured that your comments on the website directed to me are reviewed and forwarded to the new ownership where warranted, even if I don't have time to respond directly to you. Combining the new home page (click on the new logo above), which uses a different template, with the phpBB forum software, has been a huge undertaking.

I know there have been many concerns about the html tag/coding "radio" buttons not working, and hopefully now that the format of the site seems to be finalized, we can get that fixed.

If you do have a comment, I prefer direct emails to [email protected], but feel free to leave them in this topic as well.

I may have previously spoken to some of you about submitting articles, trip reports, and news to us. Although I've been very busy with the general administration of the site (approving new users, moderating certain high-visibility forums and topics, and combatting spam so that you never see it), rest assured that I have not forgotten you. If I have not spoken to you, and you are interested in contributing, please see below.

From it's beginnings in 1996 with John, to Henry, to Mike and Otto, to the current owner, Railroad.net has grown into a respected source of railroad information.

Railroad.net wrote:
Railroad.net Launches Leading News Destination For The Railroad Industry

Hello forum member,

We hope that you are enjoying being a member of the railroad.net forum. Our membership continues to grow and our forum discussions are very active. While we continue to focus on building and maintaining our leading railroad forum, we have been thinking about additional ways in which we could add even more value for railroad enthusiasts.

Recently, we launched a railroad news section. This section is promoted on the Railroad.net homepage and it updates daily with news, opinions, and commentary on the Railroad industry. The news is categorized in the following 5 sections: Amtrak, Freight Rail, High-Speed Rail, Passenger Rail and Railroad Events. Readers are encouraged to comment under our news stories.

You can subscribe to our email alerts http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailv ... ilroadnews to get a daily email with the stories posted that day.

If you are interested in becoming a guest contributor to our railroad news section, send us an email at [email protected]. Tell us about your specific interests and what types of topics you’d like to write about on Railroad.net. We’ll then get back to you to discuss the next steps.

As always, you can email us at [email protected] if you have any forum related questions or if you’d like to submit a railroad event to be featured on our events page.

Thanks for your time.

Sincerely,

Railroad.net
 #967594  by gprimr1
 
In my own personal opinion, I am ecstatic to see the face lift and can't wait to see the next generation of Railroad.net; built on the solid foundation Otto left us.
 #967772  by Desertdweller
 
Jeff,

I am a recent new member here, and want to commend you on a fine forum. It sounds like exciting times ahead!

Railroad.net is so much more than a railfan forum. It is a place where real railroaders can discuss experiences and industry trends and problems. It is an ideal forum for railfans, railroaders, model railroaders, and former railroaders alike.

I really enjoy contributing to this forum. Hopefully, other readers will enjoy reading my posts as much as I enjoy reading theirs.

Les
 #968156  by Otto Vondrak
 
gprimr1 wrote:In my own personal opinion, I am ecstatic to see the face lift and can't wait to see the next generation of Railroad.net; built on the solid foundation Otto left us.
Thanks, but the technical foundation of the old site was built by Mike Roque and Jessy Stallone (and previously by founder John Stewart). They did all the coding and server maintenance. I was merely a glorified news editor. Thanks for your support of the old site, and thanks for supporting the new owners as they move forward with the new site. Somewhere on here we had posted a huge thank you to all of our members to contributing to our success before our departure, but it seems to have disappeared...

-otto-
 #968202  by Jeff Smith
 
Thanks, Otto, I thought I was missing someone. As for the "farewell address", I did restore it for a while, and sticky it for 30 days or so which has long since expired. Or I put it back in the vault (after finding where the "vault" was, which was where I had restored it from).
 #968219  by bridpath
 
Well, I'll be a bit of the curmudgeon and note the change is apparently harder for me than many. I appreciate the work and enthusiasm and recognize change as a constant of life. Still, to this old guy some of the writing is vapid and not what I came personally to enjoy about Railroad.net - which, of course, is irrelevant in terms of website direction and focus.

Kudos for the commitment and the courage to move ahead from someone who is solidly-anchored to the past and tradition as something which still works well ;-)

Bob
 #968291  by isaksenj
 
Have a couple of things to note:

First, I was unable to post to the Announcements list of this title -- is that by design? (Interestingly, I posted this by way of the Testing page)

In any event, the primary reason for my post is that I am unable to pull up any of the articles on the new Industry page. If you click on the "full article link, the article appears momentairly, them blanks out wuth an "Error on page" warning icon at bottom left.

Clicking the icon reveals the following error (in this casae, from the PV article -- others pretty much the same):

Webpage error details

User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E)
Timestamp: Mon, 5 Sep 2011 23:01:48 UTC


Message: Permission denied
Line: 16
Char: 2822
Code: 0
URI: http://www.railroad.net/wp-includes/js/ ... ?ver=1.6.1


...so something as they say, is amiss...
 #988065  by dth9269
 
Just a couple of bits of feedback re. the news articles...I enjoy them, but a couple of things make me crazy when reading some of them:

- Please consider adding a dateline (i.e. city or location of story) at the top of the article, as otherwise it must be inferred from context and that's not always easy. There was one about a grade crossing in (apparently) Southern California recently that just referenced some random town that could have been Anywhere, USA.

- If you could have somebody review/edit the articles for grammar and spelling, that would be great, too. A recent example, from the MBTA "Football Train" article:

"Many passengers drive passed the stadium to reach the passenger rail service ..."

Everything is spelled correctly, but that's no guarantee that the right word has been used.

I'll volunteer to read some of the articles in advance, though I can't offer a real-time service for breaking stories. But if it's a question of proofreading a couple of articles a day, that should be possible. Thanks,

Dan
 #988101  by MEC407
 
Agreed re: the need for a proofreader. I posted the following comment in another thread:
MEC407 wrote:This may be somewhat off-topic, but if the owners are open to suggestions from long-time members/contributors, I have one: get someone with writing/editing/journalism experience to proofread the stuff on the front page. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but seeing major grammatical errors on the front page of the site surely isn't good for business or the site's money-making potential.
 #1000009  by Otto Vondrak
 
MEC407 wrote:Agreed re: the need for a proofreader.
Spelling, relevancy, AND accuracy? Geez, talk about a demanding crowd.
 #1002824  by MEC407
 
Apostrophe keys should be removed from their keyboards until such time as they learn to use them appropriately.