Indian Railways Fan Club

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screenshot of the site.

The Indian Railways Fan Club (IRFCA) is the internet's largest website devoted to the Indian Railways. The IRFCA is an electronic mailing list or discussion group connecting many fans particularly interested in railways in India. Mail traffic is moderately heavy, and runs around thirty to fifty messages a day most of the time.

Topics on IRFCA cover current passenger services, routes, timetables, technical details of railway operations, motive power, rolling stock, etc. It also has a large section on historical aspects of trains in India and the subcontinent.

IRFCA started with a group of rail fans discussing Indian trains in the Usenet newsgroup [1], who later decided to set up an electronic mailing list for themselves. The list was operational on 1989-08-29. The first incarnation of the list had just 9 members exchanging e-mail directly. The list was then hosted on various US university listservers (University of Maryland, College Park, Yale University, University of California, Santa Barbara) for many years, mainly because many of the members in those days were graduate students in US universities.

The list was later transferred to ONElist in 1999. ONElist later merged with eGroups, which was subsequently acquired by Yahoo! Groups. During the first ten years or so (1989-1999) the membership remained small, at 50 to 100 members, and predominantly consisted of persons in the US, with some members in the UK.

With the spread of the Internet in recent years, especially in India, membership has been continuously rising. As of April 2008 the list has more than 5,900 members from several countries. The two biggest groups on the basis of members' locations are from India and the US. The next leading contingent is probably from the UK.

The IRFCA server was originally not a single web site. The Indian Railways FAQ was maintained on a GeoCities web site, and the irfca.org domain had some Indian railfan material. Several other IRFCA members had their own web sites scattered across the net. Later the domain irfca.org [2] and all IRFCA-related material was consolidated on it.

The list's original name was "Indian Railways Fan Club of America" which was appropriate when the list began, as all the members were in the USA. When its membership grew and went global, the original name became less accurate, but it was decided to keep the acronym for nostalgic purposes.

The first ever convention of Indian Railway fans, the IRFCA Convention '06 was held on February 26, 2006 at Hotel Regency, Pune. The second convention (MAS 2007) was held at the Hotel Metro Manor, Chennai on the January 27, 2007. The third convention was held at IIT Kanpur [3] on the February 9 and 10, 2008 CNB2008.