Welcome to Penn Central Railroad Online!
Welcome to Penn Central Railroad Online, the first and largest source on the Internet for historical information about the Penn Central Transportation Company. While the Penn Central passed into history on April 1, 1976, its memory lives on here.
Bulletin Order, 4/21/2009
End of the Line: A message from the site owner
This announcement has been long in coming, and it has been true by default for a while, but it's finally time to make it official.
Effective immediately, this web site will no longer be updated. The site will not be taken down, but will remain as-is indefinitely. Eventually, I will probably remove some of the time-sensitive pages (such as model product announcements, the Sightings page, etc.) that will get stale, but otherwise all the other content will remain. I do still have a backlog of material that may get added someday if I ever get bored or really inspired, but the chances of that happening honestly are not very good.
Why am I doing this? Two reasons:
- I no longer have the desire or the spare time to work on maintaining the web site. Between my real job that I do in order to eat and pay my mortgage, take care of the house and the yard, and all of the other mundane responsibilities of life, my spare time is limited, and quite honestly, maintaining a web site falls far down the list below other things I enjoy, like working on my model railroad, railfanning, historical railroad research, writing articles, spending time with my family, etc. Take a look at the What's New page and you can see how the frequency of updates has dropped off over the years. So rather than carry on the pretense of this being a living, growing site, I think it makes more sense to let it go into retirement.
- The web site has served its purpose. A lot has changed since this web site launched back in 1995 or 1996 (I don't remember exactly when it was). Back then, the World Wide Web was much smaller than it is now. There was not a lot of Penn Central information available online. Large railroad photo web sites did not exist, so I tried to collect as much information about the Penn Central as I could in my little corner of cyberspace. Now jump ahead to 2009. There are several railroad discussion forum sites that have places to discuss Penn Central. We have sites like George Elwood's Fallen Flags site and Railpictures.net that house tens of thousands of railroad pictures, including pictures of Penn Central. We have Yahoo! Groups with a group devoted to Penn Central modeling. And (most importantly in my opinion), we now have the Penn Central Railroad Historical Society and its quarterly publication, the POST. So, with so many more resources available for the Penn Central fan, there is really no need for this site to keep going.
Obviously, I am no longer accepting new material for the web site. However, if you have photographs, drawings, an article, or other information that would like to share with the PC community, I would urge you to consider contributing it to the PCRRHS POST magazine. You do not have to be a great writer to contribute to the POST. The POST staff can work with you to take whatever you have and make it fit for publication.
Again, I do not plan to shut down this site, but I do not plan to make any further updates to it for the foreseeable future. If someone has a serious interest in taking it over and continuing to add to it, I would be willing to consider such a proposal. Otherwise, it is going to remain in stasis.
The associated Penn Central Mailing List will continue in operation for as long as people see a use for it. If traffic eventually drops off to nothing for several months, then I will likely pull the plug on it too, but otherwise, feel free to continue to discuss topics about the PC there.
I want to thank everyone who has supported this site and contributed to it over the years. There were many people whose pictures, articles, drawings, maps, and other information all made this web site what it is. I certainly did not do it alone. I especially want to thank Henry Priebe at Railfan.net, who has hosted this site for me for the last several years. Through all of our continuing efforts, we can make sure the memory of the Penn Central lives on for generations to come.
Jerry Jordak
April 21, 2009
NOTICE: If you have a question about the Penn Central, consult the Frequently Asked Questions Page first.
This web site was maintained by Jerry Jordak.
Last and final update: April 21, 2009.
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