Dude, who even knows.
Link with 1 note
Home to everything you ever wanted to know about railroad history West of the Hudson and Around New York State railroad, history in Chicago and the Midwest, Connecticut, Links to some great WebSites of New York State railroads. An index of the railroads of New York State. Railroads in Mechanicville and Ballston Spa.
Hey, take a look at this website. It’s… I don’t know what it is, really.
My first instinct is to say with the cluttered, hand-coded look, in-line off-brand ads, ancient clip art, and the assembly of hobbyist knowledge in a non-interactive, idiosyncratically paginated and directoried, personally hosted site, it’s a perfect example of the Internet 1.0 of the late 1990s.
But that’s not true, is it. If you follow links - and there are a lot of them - the “site” sprawls over multiple domains, with the same appearance, but unique (and honestly interesting) content. All kinds of railroad stuff, but also things like French golf courses.
The more I look at it the more it seems to be mid to late-2000s SEO-optimization, which would explain the network of links to related pages which might or might not themselves be optimization platforms. It definitely postdates (or at least has been updated since) the development of Facebook and Twitter integration. But by the standards of SEO optimization it seems awfully artisan - the material’s higher quality than I expect from content farms, and seems personally curated and to maintain some semblance of a coherent voice, plus it doesn’t follow the one page per topic, cranked-out and autoformatted for digestibility format I’m used to. Plus, optimizing for what? The ads are a total dog’s breakfast - the only recurring product that seems to be “in-house” are logistics services, so that might be it.
The more I follow links - half because I’m fascinated about the material discussed, half because of the page itself - the more I’m amazed at how much train content there is out there - it seriously outpaces the pop culture products I’m used to as icons of fandom content saturation. Then again, “trainspotting” was one of the original pre-internet models for anorak/otakudom. I guess it’s well-positioned for that - trains tie into pretty much every aspect of Industrial Era life, and are full of little whorled and niched aspects packed with arbitrarily large yet still finite - and well-documented - volumes of information. The kind of field anyone could enter, would take years to master, and yet could never be feasibly completely conquered. Always one more fact to track down; one more source to unearth; one more person to contact, learn from, credit, integrate into the society…
Man.