RailARC was the brainchild of two avid railfans,
Nathan Holmes and
Michael Petersen. With a mutual interest
in the Iowa Interstate railroad, the two started the
Unofficial Iowa Interstate Photo
Archive and Railfan's Guide while students at Iowa State University in
Ames, IA. As this archive grew, so did their ambitions. It began with a
desire to share their individual railroad photo archives with the public.
Eventually, RailARC was conceived as a way to do this while also
(eventually) providing a forum for others to share their photographs. After
a semester's worth of work, the database software was written and the
original RailARC was born in 2000. This site ran for a number of
years with few problems, but also few updates, mainly since we both now had
real jobs. However, after little bits of hacking here and there, a major
overhaul was released in 2006 to update the site and add new features,
resulting in the site you see here.
RailARC is intended to be an open forum for the exchange of high-quality
railroad photography. Its main purpose is to provide a research database to
assist historical researchers, modelers, and others interested in railroad
equipment. As a research database, the focus of RailARC is not on defending
copyrights and such, but instead to provide a public forum for sharing
photographs. For more information, please read the RailARC
Usage Policy.
