Taiwan Railway Net

» see trc.net.tw as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

On 12 March 2001 somebody started a Yahoo Kimo group called Taiwan Commemorative Railway Tickets. Yahoo's family feature was the cheapest possible way to run a hobby club in Taiwan at the time, and the administrator was a railfan named Cheng Pao-chih (鄭保志). Enough people turned up that a Yahoo group stopped being big enough, and on 1 May 2003 Cheng and two other enthusiasts, 王汶遠 and 倪京台, opened Taiwan Railway Net at trc.net.tw.

It was a theme portal in the full 2003 sense of the word. There were railway news items and official announcements, forums and a photography section, plus a design arm that developed railway merchandise. Every registered member got a personal blog on the site, which was not a small thing to offer in Taiwan before Wretch took over that job. The abbreviation everybody used was TRC.

The part that separated it from a forum was that it went outside. TRC organized irregular railway visits so members could meet each other and see the physical heritage they were photographing, and it chartered trains. There is a 2005 photograph of a TRC plain-fare special pulling into Taichung Station, and a 2006 photograph of a TRC DR2700 diesel express doing the same thing. The DR2700 was the old Kuang-Hua express stock, the fastest thing on the Taiwanese network in the 1960s, and by the mid-2000s getting one to run was a favor rather than a purchase.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

On 8 September 2007 the site stopped working, because of a dispute between TRC and the person who had donated the server it lived on. That is the kind of failure that ends most hobby sites permanently. What happened instead was that Ho Yuan-fu (何元富) put in two million Taiwan dollars and incorporated Taiwan Railway Co., later renamed Taiwan Railway Story Museum Co., and the site came back on 1 January 2008. In that same month TRC converted from a nonprofit into a company with the stated ambition of becoming a media outlet for railway culture rather than a club.

The funding model after that was unusual and it held for six years. Ho owned a chain of railway merchandise shops trading as Taiwan Railway Store, and the retail income was reinvested into the website. There was a TRC Taiwan Railway Story Museum outlet inside Xinwuri Station, which is the high speed rail interchange south of Taichung, so the gift shop that paid for the forum sat in the middle of the thing the forum was about.

Hobby forums of exactly this shape are where I spent the early 2000s, on Donanimhaber and frmtr, with my hardware list in the signature under every post. None of them chartered a train. What they had in common with TRC is that the whole archive, the accumulated answers and the photographs, lived at the pleasure of whoever was paying the hosting bill that month.

~ the day it died ~

The site posted its own closure notice on 3 November 2014, headed with the plain statement that Taiwan Railway Net would terminate service at the end of the year. Taiwanese press picked it up on 27 November, and both United Daily News and TTV ran essentially the same headline: no match for Facebook, Taiwan Railway Net closes at the end of December. Facebook had arrived in Taiwan around 2010 and by 2014 the railfan conversation had already relocated into groups and pages, which cost nothing to run and required nobody to own a server.

Posting stopped after 1 December 2014 and the pages were left readable through 31 December. The Internet Archive's last working capture of the front page is 26 December 2014. By 28 February 2015 the same address returns a 404, and trc.net.tw has no DNS record at all today.

~ what got buried with it ~

Eleven years of member blogs and forum photography went with the servers. The successor is a Facebook page for the TRC Taiwan Railway Story Museum, which is to say the shop outlived the website that the shop had been paying for.

One warning for anybody trying to trace this: railway.tw today redirects to railway.org.tw, which belongs to the Railway Cultural Society of the Republic of China. That is a different organization with a different history, and it is still going.

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