New Web Hosting and THORN Tower Page Revamp

For about 14 years my primary web hosting was a student computer club at a major university. Memberships and server access were off the lifetime variety and the group was very well established and all the stuff that normal web hosts typically charge for, like bandwidth and hardware, was free. Well, never make assumptions because in the age of smart phones and apps, kids these days don't know how to run servers anymore and after a literal server meltdown in October 2017, there was simply nobody with the skills to get things running again and also not much demand because...apps and AWS. My emergency mirror webhost for many years had also been forced to shut down leaving me to rely solely on Google's various free services. While this is pretty good for text, photos and videos, I was unable to host general files and my content went from appearing in most rail searches on Google to practically none of them as Google Photos aren't searchable (go figure).

Anyway, after a year of waiting in vain for the students to get their butts in gear, Eric Haas of Redoveryellow.com came to the rescue.  I don't know how long his amazing generosity will last, but as long as it does you should be able to find my photo archive at https://www.redoveryellow.com/position-light/.  I still plan to future proof my blog posts with Google and anyone else who wants to host a mirror, but at least in the short term I should be able to restore all the dead links to my own content.  It might take a few months for me to actually restore all of the gallery indexes and probably longer to fix the links but please bare with me. Anyway, to celebrate I went to the trouble of restoring my two pages on Amtrak's THORN interlocking and Amtrak THORN tower, which not only needed the photos to be reprocessed, but also re-uploaded and most of the links fixed.

In addition, I recorded two streaming sessions as I re-edited the photos with all sorts of historical commentary and fun stories learned from the THORN operators back in 2005.  I don't usually promote my attempts at live content, but there's a lot of good signaling and tower info in them.





Finally, I wanted to mention that I have uploaded Mark Beij's PRR interlocking diagram collection to a sub-directory.  I did not create an index (yet), but they should show up on Google at some point so the archive should be discoverable once again.  For anyone who forgot, the Keystone Crossings site folded about a year ago, taking with it a valuable trove of Web 1.0 era information on the PRR.  This just emphasizes the need to backup, archive and mirror any valuable you might come across.  Anyway thank you again Eric and if anyone else wants to provide mirror space please let me know.