About NSWrail.net
Goals
The goals of NSWrail.net are to,
- Provide an infrastructure for the documentation and preservation of
information about the NSW railway network.
- To provide easily-accessed information in the form of photographs,
diagrams, charts, maps and text.
- To act as a central reference point for accessing photographs of railway
infrastructure that is threatened or has already been remnoved.
Future
Up until now, the web site has been maintained by me, with very significant
contributions of content from a lot of people around the world. The
down-side of this is that I have tended to act as a bottleneck in
terms of dealing with contributions. It has also acted as a constraint
on future enhancements.
I have put together a road-map for improving the way the web site operates.
This has been broken down into the following stages:
- Stage 1 - Infrastructure Overhaul - Mar 2006
-
The web site has been completely rewritten using PHP and MySQL. This
means that most of the content is dynamically generated, allowing for
easier maintenance and more flexibility in expansion. As well as this,
I have made a lot of changes to improve navigation through the site.
- Stage 2 - External Text Contributions
-
Addition of much more detailed infrastructure descriptions for locations.
- Stage 3 - External Text Contributions
-
The next stage is to allow other people to upload new and updated text
content. For example, this would include updates to current and historic
descriptions of lines and locations.
- Stage 4 - External Photo Contributions
-
Allow external users to submit their photographs for update to the site.
- Stage 5 - Dynamic Linking with other Resources
-
There are many other sites out there with content that is relevant to
NSW Railways. Apart from manually setting up "links pages", there is
no easy way to navigate this community of sites. I will be looking
at ways to automatically link to these sites in a mutually beneficial
way.
