Bote's Railfan Pages

A Random Collection of Stuff of Interest to Railfans

With an emphasis on the D.C. and Baltimore areas where I grew up and south Florida where I now reside.

Florida East Coast Railway

F.E.C. Ry Railfan Guide: Home-made track chart showing the Florida East Coast Railway main line from Jacksonville to Miami. Mostly up to date.
F.E.C. Fort Lauderdale Train Watching Sites: Descriptions, directions, and maps to good train watching sites in and around Fort Lauderdale, Florida, U.S.A.
F.E.C. Fort Lauderdale Train Schedule: APPROXIMATE times of trains through Fort Lauderdale, Florida, U.S.A.
Book: The Railroads of U.S. Sugar: History Through the Miles: Bart Jennings wrote a book — THE book — about SCFE (South Central Florida Express) and the private U. S. Sugar railroads. Yeah, I get a cut if you click.
Book: The Greatest Railroad Story Ever Told: “The Greatest Railroad Story Ever Told: Henry Flagler & the Florida East Coast Railway's Key West Extension” by Seth Bramson, noted F.E.C. Ry historian and artifact collector
Book: Images of Rail: F.E.C.: “Images of Rail: F.E.C.” by Seth Bramson — a pictorial history of the Florida East Coast Railway
Book: Florida's Great Ocean Railway: “Florida's Great Ocean Railway” by Dan Gallagher — details the construction and operation of the Key West Extension of the Florida East Coast Railway
Book: Last Train to Paradise: “Last Train to Paradise” by Les Standiford — Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean“, the life and death of the F.E.C. Ry Key West Extension

Train Chasing Guides

SCFE and U.S. Sugar railroading guide — covering what little can be known about the operations of South Central Florida Express and U.S. Sugar Corporation railroads. They are not the same!

Sand Patch maps — DeLorme Street Atlas maps of the Sand Patch area of the CSX Keystone subdivision, Pennsylvania.

National Capital Train Chasing Guide — [obsolete] covering only CSX (and partially at that) around the lesser D.C. area with three lousy maps, needs updating.

Jeff Hawkins' Virginia Railfan Guides as printable PDFs for NS, CSX railroads; EXCELLENT resource.

Frograil — Tony Hill's Bruce Harper's site with extensive guided tours of many popular rail lines, mainly in the eastern half of the United States.

Waycross, Georgia — Brief description and links to maps of Waycross for train watching possibilities.

South Florida Guide — covering CSX and a little F.E.C. action in Broward and Palm Beach counties.

ATCSmon — When installing ATCSmon on Windows 7 64-bit, save yourself a ton of trouble by just installing it to a directory where plain old peon users have permission to write, NOT to C:\Program Files (x86)\ATCS or the like. Once I uninstalled it and re-installed it to c:\users\bote\atcs it worked perfectly. I discovered this the hard way and since the ATCS Wiki seems to have gone belly-up I'm posting this here for folks who are searching for an answer.

Photos

All Aboard Days at the B&O Railroad Museum, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A. (before the roof caved in)

Caboose photos - for the benefit of Roger Kirkpatrick

Family archives - pre-historic stuff from my father's collection

Folkston, Georgia, U.S.A. - Rail Watch video festival 2003

Book: Essential Witness: Sixty Years of Railroad Photography by Jim Shaughnessy

Sounds

Sounds page - Reference to sounds, F.E.C., and CSX sounds

Amtrak and Passenger Stuff

Amtrak Funding article

Allen Sloan, Newsweek's Wall Street editor, expounds on airlines making all their profits from government bailouts, while Amtrak must grovel for the mere scraps left over.

Tri-Rail

South Florida's commuter railroad.

Book: America's Great Railroad Stations

by Roger Straus; An evocative and stunning photographic tribute to America's railroad stations.

General Railroading Books

The Great Railroad Revolution: The History of Trains in America

by Christian Wolmar

Branch Line Empires: The Pennsylvania and the New York Central Railroads

by Michael Bezilla

North American Railroads: The Illustrated Encyclopedia

by Brian Solomon; an overview of many of the legacy railroads and how they merged or fell to history

Railroad Legacy Map of the United States

National Geographic's 2013 Railroad Legacy Map

Reference

AAR channel/frequency table: Railroad frequencies and channels cross-referenced in a compact table.
CSX dispatcher code table: my page cross-referencing CSX dispatcher codes to areas covered and AAR channel numbers used; check it for accuracy in your area and report back to me, please. The host site where this was intended to be displayed, CSX Timetables, has been taken down due to the legal sabre-rattling by CSX; national security and so forth, dontchaknow. Sheeeeee.
F.R.A. Interactive Rail Map: works best (only?) with MS Internet Explorer; shows main, branch, and abandoned rail lines, mileposts, station names, lots of detail; sluggish and intermittent, but worth the wait
International Container Code Registrar: Bureau International des Containers et du Transport Intermodal (B.I.C.)
North American Shortlines: Google docs spreadsheet of shortline railroads in the U.S. and its neighbors
Rail Signal Tutorial: Long, detailed tutorial on how railroad signals work. Uses frames so you won't see a menu until you mangle the uri to go to their home page.
Railroad Glossary: Railroad lingo from Railroad Avenue, by Freeman H. Hubbard, 1945
Reporting Marks (PWRC): database of railroad reporting marks by the Peidmont & Western RR Club
Links to other railfan sites: my page of links to other sites of interest to railfans
Restricted: Private collection.

Miscellaneous Pages

Jump to Bote's Roadgeek Pages: road signs, highway neatness.
Jump to Bote's Radio Pages: ancient two-way radio information; frequency lists.

Return to Bote's Web Nexus home page