While performing research on an upcoming post I regrettable discovered that the excellent Hutt Valley signaling website (aka Valley Signals) has gone offline with the domain, valleysignals.org.nz, now pointing to a reseller. Although focused on the specifics of signaling in Hutt Valley north of Wellington, it provided extensive detail on NZ signaling in general including the change from the relay to solid state era between 2001 and 2013. With photos, signal diagrams and quite a bit of inside information the Web 1.0 era site gave visitors all the necessary information with little fuss.
Originally hosted on Trainweb, it long ago moved to its own hosting and domain. Around a decade ago it backed up my own coverage of PETONE signalbox during its last few months of operation. Along with other web 1.0 websites like Blockstation.net and Mark Beij's signaling site (hosted on the defunct Keystone Crossings), it was easy to assume they would be be online forever. Unfortunately those with enough life experience to self-host websites in the 1990's and early 2000's are rapidly approaching the age where their heirs will be getting the emails about domain name renewal.
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| Valley Signals Webmaster in 2013 |
From what I have gathered, the individual behind Valley Signals started the site in 2001 as a way to document all aspects of railroad and railroad signaling history in the Wellington, NZ area. The site was fully fleshed out over the following three years with regular updates through 2013 when Kiwi Rail implemented a major re-signaling project in the Hutt Valley, wiping out most of the relay based signaling. Unfortunately in a 2019 "site status" blurb, he mentioned having lost all interest in railways as of 2016, but had decided to keep the site up with some additional sections on his more personal interests. By 2023 the domain had lapsed. As we can see from the photo above the owner appeared to be at least in their 70's or 80's as of a decade ago. This unfortunately does not bode well for trying to rescue the site in an official capacity and because their contact info (e-mail) was based on the valleysignals domain, there is no longer a way to reach out.
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| The webmaster waving to the last train signaled through PETONE signalbox. |
The good news is that the Wayback machine seems to have preserved most of the site contents and because the site was so static for so long, there was ample opportunity for it to be scrapped multiple times, so if you get an error for pages on the most recent dates, you can go back to 2013 without loss of content. Using this resource I was able to restore all the links on my PETONE signalbox page. Still, given the Internet Archive's own legal issues I will make an effort to save out as much of the Valley Signals content that I can. Despite the webmaster's assumed passing, if anyone knows what happened to the person or persons behind Valley Signals, please let me know as I might have some options to get a more official mirror back up and running.
