Saturday 23 December 2017

The RailGenArchive is one year old today

"Happy Christmas from the RailGenArchive team!"

The RailGenArchive is now 1 year old! The site as continued to grow throughout the year and there are now over 300,000 workings on the site, with all classes featuring without any personal bias. Not only as the site grown but the quality of the data shown as also vastly improved, with many duplicate records removed, conflicting records resolved and many mistakes either removed or corrected.

You may also have noticed over recent week back, that we made an number of changes to the site, which we feel improves both the way the RailGenArchive both works and looks. Drop down menu's have replaced the old Timewarp style static menu's while date and loco number recognition has been improved too. At the same time, we made changes to the site code to easily enable the site to adapt, allowing us to include years beyond the initial 1975-1989 time period that Timewarp covered. Indeed, due to a glitch in the new site code, a few of you may have seen a sneak preview of the new 1990 data. By the time you read these notes, our 1990 data will have been officially revealed.

With your help, we will continue to grow the site, and a further expansion of years covered will appear as time allows. Please get in touch via the RailGenArchive contacts form, by email, of via the comments box lower down this page with any additional gen or corrections to what we have already.

Many thanks for all your help and support so far. The RailGenArchive team.



© 'UD' & 'Clayhead' - Preserving the gen online since 1999...

Sunday 6 August 2017

A Rare Posting

"The site can only be as good as the gen we receive."

Being a founder member of the The Rail Gen Archive Group and playing a part in the constant updating of the Railgenarchive it is this major project that is currently taking up all my time, so this blog continues to be neglected.

I'm probably spending a minimum of 20 hours on this project each week and sometimes maybe twice that. Unlike some websites that lift their data from anywhere, gen used by the Railgenarchive is supplied to us, ideally, from the records made by you. All gen used by us is traceable back to source. Many records are traceable back to multiple observers. However our site is still subject human error and we have many reports that conflict and we are correcting and revising things all of the time. As well processing new gen and suggested corrections received, we are cross referencing gen against The Rail Gen Archive Group members websites past and present. Once I've finnished cross-checking the Railgenarchive against our old 1980's Timewarp records then these blog posts should pick up in pace, but there is still much to do.

If you can add anything to the Railgenarchive or can spot any errors, please contact us with details via our Contact page where you will find a contact form and email address or you can use the comment form on this blog if you prefer.

At the time of writing these notes, there are 278650 records on the Railgenarchive site and our mailbox is freshly emptied, all gen processed. So far, since the site went live late last December, mails have been processed and acknowledged (where contact details have been left) with a short mail within a couple of weeks or so.



© 'UD' & 'Clayhead' - Preserving the gen online since 1999...

Sunday 2 April 2017

RailGenArchive

"The website formally known as : 1980's Timewarp"

Well, three months on and the RailGenArchive database is growing steadily.
With this blog hardly setting the internet on fire I've been concentrating my efforts there rather than here.

Several thousand workings have been added to the new site since our late December launch, and we are now showing just over 267000 records.

The total would have been much higher as many duplicate records had found their way onto the site during the process of reformatting and transferring over so much data across from Timewarp and we are still working our way through removing those.
But it's not just about how many records, but how accurate are they?

The data on the site is still far from perfect, but it is getting better all the time and will continue to do so. The number of duplicate records is much reduced and many missing details, notably headcodes and which leg of service worked are being filled in. A number of long standing previously unknown data errors have been found - workings that never really happened and have been disproved, so removed, but not before they've been cut and pasted all over the net. (We know, or can find out, just who told us what... and maybe even where they got it from?)

The most important part of our old 1980's Timewarp site was the diary pages, and that is basically what The RailGenArchive site is, but a new improved version. A back end database now holds all the data and our custom written scripts generate the pages.
Now as soon as we add your data to the system, the next person to visit sees it!

If you are interested in the BR locomotive fleet and what passenger turns they worked, visit our site, choose a data filter, and you can see the data month by month, see only the one class you're interested in or see everything known just as before. You can also view data for an individual date, again with filter or just see the workings of a single loco, you choose.

For the diary pages how they were always meant to be...
Please visit... The RailGenArchive. Contact details are on the site, so please help us grow the site, pass on your new info, suggest corrections or just let us know what you think?


© 'UD' & 'Clayhead' - Preserving the gen online since 1999...