RR Picture Archives not available?

[flight2000]

http://freightcars.midatlanticrr.com/index.php

http://www.railcarphotos.com/

Two others that I use frequently.

Cheers,
Brian

[pjm20]

rrpictures.net

Google Images

[C855B]

The slowness is 24/7, although I notice it at its worst on Sunday evenings. I'm going to take a wild conjecture in that the site is on an asymmetrical drop and will never run decent until it's moved to a server-grade pipe. I run my own sites this way 'cause it's cheap, but I don't have tens of thousands of railfans hammering on them, either.

Alternatives? There are other photo sites, but as discussed before, the <ahem> "high standards" means they're all but useless as references, especially for anything before 1995 or so. "Guys, railroads existed before DSLRs." What a concept. 

[jagged ben]

Alternatives? There are other photo sites, but as discussed before, the <ahem> "high standards" means they're all but useless as references, especially for anything before 1995 or so. "Guys, railroads existed before DSLRs." What a concept. 

Yes, well, that site your talking about exists for a different purpose. 

Meanwhile, don't forget Railcarphotos.  It just has a lot of catching up to do in terms of number of pictures.

[C855B]

No, I'm talking about railcarphotos, too. I became acquainted with Stan (RIP) in the 1970s, and his near-impossible "standards" were a big turn-off even then. railcarphotos and locophotos will never catch up as a reference on account of the current ruling junta of his protégés carrying the legacy of "discerning" to stratospheric levels. Demanding absolute but arbitrary perfection leaves a lot of very useful 95%-level reference material on the cutting room floor.

[GaryHinshaw]

I far prefer railcarphotos, but I agree it is mainly useful for contemporary shots.  It's always my first stop, and if they have what I need I'm done, and done quickly.  If not, I try rrpicturearchves and buck up for a slog through endless thumbnails to try and find what I want, usually tripping on utterly useless gems like this or this, which show up in their barely-indexed collection of 4793 TTAX spine car photos.   

If their collection was put into a railcarphotos database engine and had some standards applied, we'd be much better off.

[nkalanaga]

I have RailcarPhotos bookmarked, but very seldom find anything useful on the site.  Modeling 1974, nearly everything I look up has been repainted, rebuilt, or scrapped long ago.

My usual progression, when looking for a particular car, is:

rrpicturearchives - they seem to have the most pictures, and a good selection of 1960s cars.  One almost HAS to know the car number, or at least the series, to find something, as they don't give details on the index page.

http://canadianfreightcargallery.ca/ - they seem to have more older pictures, and often give build dates and number series on the index page.  Very handy for finding a car without digging through pictures.

George Elwood's http://www.rr-fallenflags.org/ - the indexing can be a little odd, such as having to look in CB&Q to find FW&D cars, but again, he has older pictures.  He may not have as many as the other sites, but there have been times he was the only one with a picture of the car I was seeking.

Gary:  I agree that those examples are useless to a freight car modeler, but they could be of use to someone modeling a complete train.  If the goal is to match a "typical" consist for a train, the exact car numbers are lees important than the mix.  I'd rather have too many pictures than too few, but agree that they could use better indexing.  I usually go straight to the "Car # Ranges" option and look for the closest number to mine.  Of course, if one doesn't KNOW the number, that doesn't help much.  Trying to find an XYZ railroad 40 ft double door boxcar, knowing nothing about their roster except that they owned at least one, can be a pain.  That's where I usually start with one of the other two.  The Canadian site even separates pictures by car type.

[John]

I just want to point out -- these are all free services, just like RW .. the owners fund these sites .. so your user experience may not be googleesque ...

[wcfn100]

I just want to point out -- these are all free services, just like RW .. the owners fund these sites .. so your user experience may not be googleesque ...

And 100% of the content is provided to them for free. 

Jason

[nkalanaga]

True, the content is free, but building and maintaining the website isn't, unless they're using somebody else's equipment.  Depending on the "somebody else" it's possible they get the site for free, but I'd consider it unlikely.  No, there are almost certainly significant expenses, which I suspect is the main reason for the less than "Googleesque" performance.  Google Search is also free, but they make a LOT of money from their advertizing branch, which railroad picture sites couldn't do.  I can't imagine Railwire, for instance, running an online ad hosting business to compete with Google...

[wcfn100]

True, the content is free, but building and maintaining the website isn't, unless they're using somebody else's equipment.

I'm not trying to down play the cost, but with as much content they get, as far as I'm concerned, it's a wash.  Or to put it another way, how much would it have cost them to acquire 3.7 million photos on their own?


Jason

[nkalanaga]

To take, or buy, all of the pictures themselves?  A large fortune.  All of those sites are among those I hope have plans for the death, of changing interests, of their owners.  One of the problems with electronic data is that, unlike printed material, it can easily disappear, with no way to recover it.  Future historians may well find that much of the 21st century is as lost as the Library of Alexandria.

[Missaberoad]

To take, or buy, all of the pictures themselves?  A large fortune.  All of those sites are among those I hope have plans for the death, of changing interests, of their owners.  One of the problems with electronic data is that, unlike printed material, it can easily disappear, with no way to recover it.  Future historians may well find that much of the 21st century is as lost as the Library of Alexandria.

For this exact reason Ive been going through the various photo sites saving/labeling photos of interest.
Hard drives are cheap considering all the information available.
also glad DKS's website is still on the internet archive, printed out his articles for reference/inspiration...

as for the value of the photos a morning sun guide is about 60$ for ~300 pictures. makes these sites seem priceless
and makes me want to thank the people that maintain them...

Ryan

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Don't forget the close to 30k photos here:
http://thecrhs.org/ConrailPhotos

It's Conrail stuff and post-Conrail (former Conrail equipment)

[cv_acr]

True, the content is free, but building and maintaining the website isn't, unless they're using somebody else's equipment.  Depending on the "somebody else" it's possible they get the site for free, but I'd consider it unlikely.  No, there are almost certainly significant expenses, which I suspect is the main reason for the less than "Googleesque" performance.  Google Search is also free, but they make a LOT of money from their advertizing branch, which railroad picture sites couldn't do.  I can't imagine Railwire, for instance, running an online ad hosting business to compete with Google...

For canadianfreightcargallery.ca I'd say it costs me (on average and out of pocket) about $20/year for the domain name and another $20 or so /year for hosting, which has been working out pretty well for me. Some of that is moved around by paying for a few years in advance, which is a big one time payment but lowered the overall average yearly cost. On my site, and George Elwood's rr-fallenflags.org, there's no thumbnails to drag down bandwidth and performance. Trade-off is that if there's a few dozen photos of cars from the same series, it's harder to pick out variations and oddballs, you'd have to go through each one.