Making UtahRails.net
Index For This Page
This page was last updated on June 5, 2026.
Making UtahRails.net
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. My first HTML editor came as part of the Netscape suite 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.
(The Winged Shield is a reference to the logo of the Union Pacific Railroad of the 1940s to the 1960s, a shield, or medallion, with wings. The Winged Shield made its first appearance with the delivery of E3 locomotives in mid-1939. It was dropped in the early 1960s with the last new passsenger locomotives, and re-instated in 2000 with the delivery of new SD70 lorocomtives.)
Frontpage
In January 1999 I purchased Microsoft's Frontpage 98 using royalties from various book and magazine projects 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 (or advertising) 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 with the Union Pacific locomotive directories and did not take the time to develop any sort of real website other than a very minimal website, based on a template that was part of Frontpage.
In March 2001, I purchased Frontpage 2000 after reading a positive review of the fixes in the newest version. For the next two years, I used Frontpage 2000 to manage the entire website (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 what reviewers perceived as limitations with the program were not a factor. Their shared borders feature made a nice left-side navigation possible.
Until March 2004, I regularly used Frontpage 2002 to edit my web pages, and to link them to each other via various internal index pages (truly a significant time saver 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. Throughout this period of using Frontpage, early 2001 through early 2004, I also used TopStyle to help use cascading style sheets to their best advantage. I also focused on the CSE Validator and HTML Tidy to make sure the HTML matched the W3C School standard.
UtahRails 1998 -- (Version 1.0) The first version of UtahRails, known as The Winged Shield (mid 1998).
UtahRails 1998 -- (Version 1.5) When UtahRails went dark (late 1998).
UtahRails 2000 -- (Version 2.0) When UtahRails was little more than a name; first steps with Frontpage; still lots of coding by hand (early 2000).
UtahRails 2000 -- (Version 2.5) After Frontpage got better (late 2000).
UtahRails 2003 -- (Version 3.0) The magic of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) makes UtahRails a bit easier to maintain, and a bit nicer to look at.
PHP
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 19th. The move to PHP also meant that I had to give up using Frontpage, and move back to coding by hand in in a text editor, 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 install a local testing server that used 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 was selected. But Dreamweaver falls completely flat with this task. In fact, if you don't know the exact text of named anchor, there was no way to enter the link. But on the plus side, I really like the way Dreamweaver displays tables, allowing me to edit 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 intra-site navigation, a simple text editor works quite well as a basic authoring tool. Way back in 1998, I discovered a program called NoteTab, a 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. (As of July 2012, NoteTab was still going, with version 7 just released. NoteTab Lite was still free.)
Most of my original research existed in the form of either WordPerfect files, from before 1999, or later as Microsoft Word files. To convert these files to web pages, I used the HTML export filter in Word. As each was converted, I used NoteTab to reduce the extraneous code, with the goal being to assure a speedy download for visitors. Scanned articles were done with Omnipage, 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 was the best of several CSS editors (now owned by HTMLValidator.com, who also owns the excellent CSS HTML Validator). I should mention here that regular visits to "A List Apart" and "HTML Dog" aided greatly in my learning the joys of styling with CSS.
In February 2026 all dynamic PHP files at UtahRails were converted to static HTML files. This was done using a PowerShell script created with the help of Google Gemini AI, with the final version of the script resulting from seven back-and-forth exchanges of what was needed and what finally worked. With a working PowerShell script, a total of 2,046 files were converted in less than five minutes. UtahRails has been using dynamic PHP scripting since 2004.
(Read more about how I edit web pages)
Standards
If we don't use the standards, we make it harder for everybody. As of mid April 2015, these pages are all compliant with HTML5 standards (or should be unless I fumble-finger the odd bit here and there). I try to stay away from special features specific to any particular browser.
I have compiled several links to companies, HTML references, CSS references, and HTML standards.
Photos
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 allowed me to upload the images and edit captions and descriptions online. (Gallery was no longer being developed or supported, as of June 2014.)
Keeping up with the Gallery installation was becoming a maintenance headache. For a simple user like me, having to be "the man behind the curtain" was becoming almost unbearable, kind of like a carpenter having to make a new hammer for each new job, and having to understand metallurgy at the same time. So in January 2010, I decided to let someone else maintain the home of my photo albums, and I would only have to worry about the photos themselves. After trying both Flickr and PBase, I signed up to use SmugMug for all of UtahRails' photo albums. I'm willing to give up some of the customization, in return for the freedom of getting away from site maintenance, and they have great customer support.
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. For a different, more complex approach to image improvement, Photoshop CS came on board in February 2005. 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.
In May 2012, I upgraded to Photoshop CS6, but soon found that the program no longer supports 'Import' from either my Epson scanner, or the Minolta Konica slide scanner. I upgraded my Vuescan installation, and it does a great job supporting both scanners in Windows 7. Although I was forced to use Vuescan, it has turned to be for the better. Vuescan, in combination with the FastStone Viewer was proving to be a very powerful team for image processing.
The scanners have been upgraded, and since November 2012 I've been using an Epson V700 for flat scanning, and since October 2017, an Epson V850 flatbed scanner.
(Read more about how I scan photos)
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