Railpage Australia

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Railpage Australia
Railpage Australia homepage
URL http://www.railpage.com.au/
Type of site Railway enthusiast website
Owner Interactive Omnimedia
Created by Railpage Development Team
Launched Circa 1992
Current status Active

Railpage Australia is a community website focusing on railways within Australia and Oceania. The site is run by volunteers, and provides free or reduced-cost internet services to not-for-profit railway organisations and preservation groups[1]. It has been quoted as a source in a number of major state and national newspapers, as well as in a number of government and private research publications.

Contents

[edit] General

Railpage is the largest railway-oriented web-site in Australia[2] and was among the first 100 web sites to be hosted in Australia[3].

The site allows railway enthusiasts to find and exchange news, pictures and information relating to mainly Australian trains and railway infrastructure. The site includes a user photo database, discussion forums, a chat room and a railway news section.

The discussion forums are divided into separate sections, such as Australian based discussions, heritage interest groups, and overseas discussions.

Although around 50 percent[4] of forum users are under 26 years of age, nearly a quarter of contributors are involved in the rail industry[5].

[edit] History

Railpage started in 1992 as a cfingerd service on David Bromage's account on Monash University's general access Unix server. Anybody could finger the account and view the indexpage, and further view the railpage. The name lives on.

The content of the finger service was translated to an experimental web site in July 1994. It is believed to have been the first Australian railway site on the World Wide Web. Early content included a repository of Australian railway timetables[6], inspired by a contemporary project in the United States.[citation needed]

In January 1995, Brian Evans suggested to David Bromage that Railpage (which at that point comprised static web pages) could be further developed. The two began to develop the site further, later transferring it to a dedicated server.

The site gained its own domain name (railpage.org.au) in January 1997.

On January 11, 2003, Railpage introduced an on-line forums service using the open source PhpBB forum software.

Assuming the role of Project Director, (which he still maintains today), Brian Evans proposed the website enter a new development phase, involving the introduction of a Content Management System (CMS). The site had accumulated a significant number of unique URLs and was becoming increasingly harder to maintain. A solution to provide content owners with an ability to create and maintain content at the site became a priority.

Late in 2003, after several months of development and with the help of several developers and testers; RP2 was launched on Saturday 10 April 2004 at approximately 5pm. While at the time the portal structure was primitive and contained a number of bugs present in all Nuke releases - the portal offered a number of new services to users including an image gallery and news feeds.

As of January 2008, the site routinely receives in excess of 1000 posts per day, and over 62,000 unique visitors and 13,000,000 hits per month. The domain www.railpage.com.au alone serves in excess of 30 gigabytes of data per month[7]. As of April 2008, the site had reached 16,000 registered users and 1,000,000 posts[8].

[edit] Uses in society

Railpage enjoys a long history of use as a reference source for railway information in Australia, in particular with the Federal and State governments.

In December 2003, Railpage and the Australasian Railway Association helped the then Australian Geological Survey Organisation (now Geoscience Australia) produce the Railways of Australia thematic map.[9]

Railpage was used as a secondary source of information by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2004.[10]

Railpage was used as a source by the Museum of Victoria in preparing its Victorian Railways history portal.[11]

It was sole source of reference in the Wyndham City Council's Tram Investigation Study.[12]

In recognition of its educational merit as a source of research, Railpage is included in the EdNA, the Australian Government Education Portal, list of approved school resources as a directory of resources on Australian railways.[13]

In February 2007, the Bureau of Transport and Regional Economics used information posted in a Railpage hosted site, "Gheringhap Loop", to produce an information paper on rail freight activity data.[14] In the forward, the Executive Director of BTRE states (in part) "Following the growth in private train operations ... rail freight activity data became increasingly scarce. The lack of data can be a challenge for the BTRE in providing the government with timely and accurate information about trends in Australian freight transport. ... In the meantime, the BTRE has investigated other potential data sources, including information from railway enthusiasts."

As of July 2007, Railpage has 5 citations on Google Scholar.[15]

The Parliament of Australia lists Railpage as a Key Internet Link on transport economics and transport law for Members and Senators.[16][17] Railpage is also used as a resource by senior State Government officals. [18]

Those who have contributed in an official capacity have included the president of the Public Transport Users Association Daniel Bowen[19], the Victorian Director of Public Transport Jim Betts[20] and the Victorian Department of Infrastructure's Fare Policy Manager Adrian Webb.[21] Television presenter Scott McGregor has participated in a live chat on the web site.[22]

Its founder, David Bromage, has been featured in a number of media articles and interviews including by ABC radio on the history of the XPT[23] and trainspotting[24] with Railpage cited as a source for further information. Other staff including Michael Greenhill and James Morgan have participated in media coverage about Railpage.[2]

[edit] Hosting services

Railpage, through its hosting partner Digital River, continues to provide free or reduced-cost web hosting to a number of railway and heritage oriented societies in Australia. From 1999 to 2004, Railpage hosted the popular Vicsig web site[25], and continues to provide internet services to the Seymour Railway Heritage Centre. Other hosting includes the Diamond Valley Railway at Eltham[26], the Australian Association of TimeTable Collectors[27], and the Australian Society of Section Car Operators[28] amongst others.

[edit] Technical

Railpage Australia is based on PHP-Nuke[29], however as times wears on it bears less and less resemblance to the original release. Its code base is PHP and the back end database runs MySQL.

[edit] New servers

A brand new server was sourced in late June to take over the task of handling both Railpage and the other websites hosted by Railpage. The migration of the main Railpage website from Fang to the new server was completed on the 3rd July 2007, and launched on the 5th July 2007[30].

In early June the database was moved onto a temporary server while the main one is rebuilt[31]. This has resulted in a slight performance boost. It is not known at this stage how long the database will remain on its current server.

[edit] Site development staff

The Railpage codebase is the collaborative work of a number of users. Early code contributors were David Bromage (dbromage) and Brian Evans (bevans), who were later joined by James Morgan (webslave), Michael Greenhill (michaelgreenhill), Lionel Camilleri (loco), James Holt (jholt), and Phil Hawthorne (philbert). All site staff are volunteers who undertake all management and development taks including server configuration and maintenance (as the site is self-hosted).

[edit] References

  1. ^ Railpage hosting notice
  2. ^ a b "Full Head of Steam", Heidelberg and Valley Weekly, 2006-09-26, pp. 10-11. 
  3. ^ In June 1994, one month before Railpage was translated to a web site, there were 2,738 web sites in the entire world.[1] At the time Australia had between 2 and 3% of total world Internet presence.[2][3]
  4. ^ Your age as at 1 June 2006, a poll taken of forum users (140 responses), retrieved 9 March 2007.
  5. ^ What is your occupation?, a poll taken of forum users (121 responses), retrieved 10 March 2007.
  6. ^ Romney, Jason. "Thomas the Cyber Engine", The Age, 1994-10-24. 
  7. ^ Usage stats from the new server
  8. ^ Forums footer, which gives the number of users and posts
  9. ^ NATMAP Railways of Australia. Geoscience Australia. Retrieved on 2007-07-23.
  10. ^ Statsercise 3 2004, Canberra, Australia: Australian Bureau of Statistics, <http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/D3310116.NSF/8eded5e0a14f570aca256e15001c9894/96b9d64db416c24eca256f960006c8d7/$FILE/Statsercise%203%202004.pdf>. Retrieved on 23 July 2007 
  11. ^ Resources, Victorian Railways, Museum Victoria, Australia. Retrieved on 2007-07-23.
  12. ^ Wyndham City Council Meeting Notes (2005-08-15). Retrieved on 2007-07-23.
  13. ^ School Education / Curriculum Resources / Technology / Systems. Retrieved on 2007-07-23.
  14. ^ Filling a gap in rail data: an investigation of the Gheringhap Loop train sightings, Canberra, Australia: Bureau of Transport and Regional Economics, 2007, pp. 15, <http://www.btre.gov.au/publications/53/files/ip57.pdf>. Retrieved on 23 July 2007 
  15. ^ Railpage - Google Scholar. Retrieved on 2007-07-23.
  16. ^ Economics Internet Resources: Transport. Parliament of Australia Parliamentary Library. Retrieved on 2007-07-23.
  17. ^ Law Internet Resources: Transport Law. Parliament of Australia Parliamentary Library. Retrieved on 2007-07-23.
  18. ^ It's safer to say it with flowers. The Age. Retrieved on 2008-03-31.
  19. ^ Railpage Australia Forums - Profile of 'dbowen'. Retrieved on 2007-07-30.
  20. ^ Railpage Australia Thread - 'Questions and Answers with Jim Betts'. Retrieved on 2007-07-30.
  21. ^ Railpage Australia Thread - 'Jim Betts - Questions & Answers'. Retrieved on 2007-07-30.
  22. ^ Railpage Australia - 'Q&A Chat Session with Scott McGregor, 16/12/2004'. Retrieved on 2007-07-30.
  23. ^ "XPT 20 years on", ABC Riverina NSW, 2002-04-08. 
  24. ^ "Trainspotting", ABC Goldfields WA, 2003-09-24. Retrieved on 2007-07-23. 
  25. ^ About Vicsig. Retrieved on 2007-07-23.
  26. ^ Diamond Valley Railway. Retrieved on 2007-07-23.
  27. ^ Australian Association of TimeTable Collectors. Retrieved on 2007-07-23.
  28. ^ Australian Society of Section Car Operators. Retrieved on 2007-07-23.
  29. ^ The footer of every page generation contains the PHP-Nuke copyright and version information
  30. ^ New server ahoy!
  31. ^ Scheduled outage for database server rebuild

[edit] External links