After several recent outings, I realized that I was starting to get quite a collection of fairly decent railroad pictures that were doing nothing more than gathering “virtual” dust on my hard drive. Like most amateur rail fans I’m sure, I wasn’t sure what to do with these pictures. I knew I wanted to share them with other rail fans, but the question was where? The problem I encountered was threefold. There were very several sites that allowed users to upload photos to their forums, however the problem with forums is that they kept track of pictures on a thread by thread basis, and not necessarily in any particular category or order. The only other site I found which allowed you to easily store photos in a gallery by railroad was somewhat selective in the pictures it took and posted for viewing. So really that only left starting my own website like many other rail fans do which created the third set of problems, but ultimately seemed like the best long term solution.
After getting started on my own site and organizing some of my better pictures, a thought hit me, that is I can’t be the only other rail fan out there with this problem. After doing some digging I realized this was indeed the case, there are a lot of others out there with pictures that are doing nothing but sitting. So I decided to change the focus of my new site and turn it into a “community” site for other rail fans as well. After doing some digging I finally found some software that would allow the site to have both a picture gallery and a forum for the community to share both their pictures and their stories about their railroad adventures.
After several weeks of work the site started to take shape. Users could now upload pictures to the galleries and categorize them by railroad, and then link them to a story in the forums if they wanted to create a trip report. Hence www.tracksideproductions.com was born. While there are still many new features I want to add to the site, it is now functional and growing. As time moves on I hope it will become a resource for rail fans to both learn about trains, photography, and so on, while giving them a place to share and view photos from other railfans.
Anyway to make a long story short I invite you to visit www.tracksideproductions.com and become a part of the community. Please also feel free to join the community and offer any ideas as to how we can improve, in the meantime start sharing your photos and viewing the ones taken by other members. New photos are always wanted.

Happy rail fanning,
James.