About UtahRails.net
This page was last updated on October 20, 2006.
Here at UtahRails.net, our aim is to provide in-depth historical information about railroading in Utah. Of course, any story about Utah's railroads must also include background information about the industries the railroads serve, so you will also find information about mining companies, canning companies, and grain and flour mills and elevators, and eventually, any company that shipped anything in a railroad car.
Along with Utah's fascinating railroad history, we also have available lots of history of the equipment of Utah's railroads, such as locomotives, cabooses, passenger cars, and freight cars. The most visited pages on the site are those about Union Pacific's present-day (and previous) fleet of diesel locomotives. Other important equipment roster pages cover the rolling stock of D&RGW, Utah Railway, and Kennecott Copper, along with the diesel locomotives of Chicago & Northwestern Railway.
At times it seems we've only scratched the surface, but progress is being made. This is truly a work in progess, so please come back often.
Why UtahRails.net?
During the last half of the year 2000, I became a bit disillusioned with publishing in printed books and magazine articles, realizing that it was not as satisfying as I had first imagined it could be. I wanted to share my research at a much quicker pace than the realities of printing to paper would allow. Financial compensation is not really an issue, since I have come to realize that my particular fields of interest have such a small potential market.
I have always been interested in railroad history (especially Utah railroads), railroad locomotives (especially UP and D&RGW locomotives), and business and industrial history (especially as they apply to railroads in Utah). With many file boxes and three-ring binders full of research, and a seemingly endless number of potential publications to get out, publishing to the internet soon became very attractive.
In early 2002, an opportunity came for a dedicated domain name (UtahRails.net), and on May 12, 2002, the new UtahRails.net web site went "live" for anyone in the world with a computer and an internet connection, and an interest in Union Pacific in Utah, Rio Grande in Utah, Utah Railway, and all other railroads in Utah, along with the industries served by those railroads.
Life In The HTML Fast Lane
It all started back in late July 1998, when I did "The Winged Shield" as my first web site. It was hosted by US West, my dial-up internet service provider at the time. I first used the editor that was part of the Netscape suite that was furnished with the software package from US West. I changed from US West to a local provider (Deseret On-line) in October 1998, but other priorities came up and the web site went inactive.
In January 1999 I purchased Microsoft's Frontpage 98, but was unable to use it due to restrictions from my service provider. I soon learned that doing a web site proved to be more than I wanted to deal with, due to the difficulty of dealing with local and remote servers, along with all the other HTML "help" from Microsoft and Netscape. I gave up for several months, and instead spent small amounts of time learning the basics of writing HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the programming language of web pages. I wanted to produce web pages that will serve as reference resources, with no need for flashing graphics and busy glitz that so many of today's web pages contain to impress and hold visitors.
In January 2000, I changed to XMission as my internet service provider. The new service came with web space compatible with Frontpage, but I was deeply involved in the UP locomotive directories and did not take the time to develop any sort of real web site other than this very minimal web site, based on a template that was part of Frontpage.
In October 2000 I purchased Frontpage 2000 after reading a positive review of the fixes in the newest version. From then on I used Frontpage 2000 to manage the entire web site (called UtahRails, but with an address at XMission), upgrading to Frontpage 2002 in July 2002. The advantages of Frontpage far outweighed simple FTP uploading and text-only editing. I used simple page designs, so the program's perceived-by-reviewers limitations were not a factor. Their shared borders feature made a nice left-side navigation possible.
Until March 2004, I used Frontpage 2002 regularly to edit my web pages, and to link them to each other via various internal index pages (truly a significant timesaver on a project as complicated as the all-time UP diesel roster). Microsoft had done a great job at improving the program, and it was now much simpler to use. Frontpage was especially useful to publish only pages that have been changed, relieving me of having to keep track of what has been changed or updated. Also, contrary to previous versions, it does not add any HTML code to an existing page. Along with the feature that listed recently changed pages, the feature that found and fixed broken links was especially useful.
In mid March 2004 I made the decision to embrace PHP scripting, in order to use a common header, footer, and menu across the entire web site. The decision was driven by my initial use of the Gallery photo album. I began converting all of the pages on UtahRails.net to PHP scripts on March 28, and the last page, of over 800 pages, was converted on April 19, 2004. The move to PHP also meant that I had to give up using Frontpage, and move back to coding by hand in NoteTab, and uploading with CuteFTP. To test the pages locally, prior to uploading them to my web service provider's remote server, I took the opportunity to load local versions of both the Apache HTTP server and PHP script preprocessor.
In June 2005, I bought a copy of Dreamweaver to edit the web site. I like many of the program's features, except for one continuing difficulty. I do a lot of linking from within one page to another, making use of named anchors. Frontpage was very good at it, by displaying a list of anchors in any one particular page when that page is selected. But Dreamweaver falls completely flat with this task. In fact, if you don't know the exact text of named anchor, there is no way to enter the link. But on the plus side, I really like Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG table features, such as being able to select an entire column and applying a CSS class to just that column.
Without the need for busy graphics and image maps for intrasite navigation, a simple text editor works quite well as a basic authoring tool. Way back in 1998, I discovered a program called NoteTabPro, a shareware text editor from Switzerland meant to replace the Windows Notepad text editor that comes with every Windows operating system. To help automate many tasks in authoring HTML (and now, PHP), NoteTab has evolved into a powerful HTML tool because of its unique ability to create and use what are called "clips," bits and snippets of text that can saved and reused when needed.
Most of my original research exists in the form of either WordPerfect files, from before 1999, or later as Microsoft Word files. To convert these files to web pages, I use the HTML export filter in Word. As each is converted, I use NoteTab to reduce the extraneous code, with the goal being to assure a speedy download for visitors. Scanned articles are done with Omnipage 15, importing the text directly into Dreamweaver from the Windows clipboard.
While progressing in my journey of mastering the basics of HTML code and web site authoring, I have learned the value of Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS), which are used to keep a consistent look to a group of web pages. Topstyle Pro from Bradsoft is the best of several CSS editors. I should mention here that regular visits to A List Apart and HTML Dog have aided greatly in my learning the joys of styling with CSS.
For the photo albums, I first used Web Album Creator from Galleria Software. After they stumbled with their customer support, I changed to another client-side photo album program called PhotoThumb, a program that gave me the flexibility of using cascading style sheets. In September 2003, the photo albums (created with PhotoThumb) were split off from the main web site to allow easier file management. In March 2004, I took my first steps into the server-side programming world of PHP with the Gallery photo album, an open source PHP suite that allows me to upload the images and edit their album pages on-line.
To prepare the images themselves, beginning in August 2002, the slides were scanned using a Minolta Scan Dual II, in combination with Ed Hamrick's VueScan software, and Paint Shop Pro 7 to resize and enhance the images. In November 2004, a larger Microtek i900 flatbed scanner, with film scanning glass tray, was added, and in January 2005 the Minolta Scan Dual II was replaced by a much improved (and cheaper) Scan Dual IV. Paint Shop Pro 7 has been upgraded to a much improved version 9, and Photoshop CS has been procured for a different, more complex approach to image improvement. In November 2005, the previous Microtek i900 scanner was sent to the great eBay beyond, and replaced by a new Epson 4990 Photo, which does a better job of scanning 8x10 negatives.
I have compiled several links to companies, HTML references, CSS references, and HTML standards. Click here to go to those links in the Web Site Tools section of my links page.
If we don't use the standards, we make it harder for everybody. On any one day, 80-90 percent of the visitors to these pages use Microsoft Internet Explorer. So, while I don't use IE-exclusive features, I do test my pages in other browsers, such as Firefox-PC, Firefox-Mac, IE6-PC, Opera-PC, Opera-Mac, and Safari. I really don't care if these pages don't display perfectly in some minority browser, or on some silly little mobile device. I figure validation by W3C standards is good enough.
