Thanks Sammy, for that informed response. I was an early subscriber to the magazine and miss it to this day.

No, I don't currently host this site. I lease a server and would be very willing to do so, but they (Doug?) found another option and didn't take me up on the offer.

Should that be something of interest, the powers that be are welcome to get in touch. But for now, I cannot take credit for hosting it. (Unless it's in some dark corner of my server, running on autopilot and forgotten but I really don't think so?)

Side note, I do have the ability to do HTTPS, which I'd immediately switch the site over to in order to get rid of the "not secure" warnings.

ETA, I seem to recall some concern over migrating the existing system to a new server, compatibility issues and the like. The usual sort of stuff, and keeping it where it was seemed to be a better option than attempting a migration and possibly losing stuff.

All of you gentlemen deserve a giant THANK YOU for doing whatever you can to keep RyPN free.

Pentex did the same thing to Pacific Rail News, later just Rail News, which provided in-depth analysis of Class Is, regionals and short lines west of the Mississippi River in the pre-internet age, at a time (1993 or so) when Trains magazine was moving toward travel reporting. Never quite understood what Pentrex was after.

Maybe they were after ME. Those two magazines were the only ones to ever show an interest in publishing anything of mine. Not only that, but they decided to put out a video on Mexican railroads including the MdelP after mine started to sell. Their narration included mistakes in my L&RP article which were added without my knowledge, so I know exactly where they got their information.

I had to be content with living the dream....

Not in any legal sense. Bob Yarger was the news editor at L&RP, after Pentrex suspended publication of L&RP Bob and Hume Kading co-founded RYPN as a web-based alternative outlet for the kind of news Bob used to publish at L&RP. But there was never at any time any legal or corporate connection between L&RP and RYPN.

Strangely enough I just took a look at some captures of Rypn.org at the Internet Archive from the ca. 1997-2004ish years after I joined Hume and Bob as the third member of the volunteer staff. I was astonished by how much we published back then -- much more than I remembered. Some good times, some good memories.

A few facts about why that really early 1990s and early 00s-era content is gone -- Hume was self-taught in Web publishing, I was a novice too, and the site reflected that (Bob Yarger was never a tech guy and did not do any of the HTML markup or publishing). It's hard now to remember that the Web was ever that new, or that people hand-wrote HTML, made newbie "mistakes" like hard-coding links as "full URL" rather than relative links internal to one folder tree or web (which made them break with any server migration), and then used hand-coded scripts or early visual editors that relied on long-gone and forgotten server-side extensions. But we did all those things. It was the 90s, man, and we were making it up and learning as we went along.

But the long and the short of it is on the technical side the content was and is a technical mess. To republish it now you'd have to strip the words and images out, if they survive at all, and recode it all from scratch. And most of it honestly is not of great relevance any longer -- a lot of it was news which was interesting at the time but is now 20+ years under the bridge. There is permanent value in some of the first-hand articles like Sammy's reminiscences and Preston's EMD content, and Lord knows I put a lot of work into what I wrote, but a lot of it was really ephemeral as news often is.

With that same 20+ years remove, all I would say is that from my perspective, the Interchange (which was intended to be a minor adjunct to the Web magazine) became the heart of the community which formed around the site, and it overtook the idea of a Web magazine entirely. And it is entirely fitting it is the Interchange not the Web magazine that survives.

And in a loose and personal sense, it was also the Interchange killed the Web magazine side of the site -- in that a small proportion of registered users of the Interchange became so unpleasant and bullying (especially after Hume tried to incorporate as a 501c3 and inadvertently created a threatenable legal entity) that all three 1990s founders or editors (Hume, Bob and me in a support role to those two) ceased to enjoy what we were doing, and ultimately walked away from the project and more or less left railway preservation entirely and found other activities and interests to invest ourselves in.

But it almost certainly would have ended up the same way anyway despite that personal unpleasantness -- the rise of Facebook and social media and streaming video would have smashed RyPN editorial flat no matter what. No one -- and I mean no one --- has really ever figured out a sustainable business model for a native online editorial magazine. It was a cool effort, and we had a good time trying and I made some great friends at the time working on it, but it was not where the culture was headed, and there was in the end no business model for it.

Any who might not have been there at the time would have to learn or remember that Pentrex was the Big Kahuna of railfan video production at the time--the major network, the HBO, the Blockbuster Video, the Redbox of railfanning video in North America. Some will remember that they also tried their hand at book publishing as well as magazines, and later acquired Interurban Press. In essence, they were poising themselves to be to railfanning and model railroading in a "modern" era what Kalmbach Publishing had long been (50 years or so).

I heard some well-placed speculation at the time by other major players in the field that Pentrex's major motivation for acquiring the magazines was to essentially advertise for "free" its video and print publications in the pages. Go grab a 1980s-1990s copy of ANY typical railfanning magazines, peruse the advertising, and you'll get a sense why that could well be true. (It has to be remembered that before the major media shift to the Internet, advertising almost exclusively paid for the physical printing and distribution cost of production of a newspaper or magazine, while subscriptions paid for content.)

Few could have foreseen the seismic change brought about in communications, reporting, recreation and education by that newfangled "internet of things" in households, and then smartphones. Everything from railroads to model railroads to the publications and videos that attempt(ed) to cover them have been profoundly changed and impacted. Videotapes replaced films (yes, you could buy railfan movie films "back in the day"!!), videotapes dropped in price, DVDs replaced tapes, and now online streaming is threatening to totally do away with hard-copy video/audio "ownership." Railroad or model-railroad simulation programs on computers threaten to totally replace scale models, just as online availability of "adult videos" and "marital aids" threaten the existence of the few remaining "adult stores" and even human relationships in the 21st century. What used to be four pages of model RR ads from one seller and two pages of book listings from another in the magazines turned into a business-card-size ad, or even Amazon retailers, and what used to be major hobby shops with walls of model offerings are now warehouses with a web sales portal and maybe curbside pickup if you live nearby. And where are the hobby shops and bookstores and newsstands where you could peruse many magazines just to see what was new this issue, or even discover that such magazines existed? GONE.

The larger problem of the "big picture" here is that forums like this one are increasingly seen as obsolete and archaic. This is basically what replaced "newsgroups" (alt.railroad , anyone?) and Yahoo/AOL/etc. chatrooms, e-mail groups, etc. Forums/websites like this, in turn, have been supplanted by "social media," YouTube, and their ilk, and even those are now being replaced in kind by TikTok or "whatever the kids are playing with today......" But with each progression, there is no agreed-upon cohesive convention or centralized location or format for whatever hobby, avocation, interest, etc. for the "next generation." Anyone who knows marketing will tell you: Whereas before you could count on advertising or promotion in certain media or places to do the job, now unless you are focusing on an especially niche market (say, write off anyone over 22 or under 65) you are forced to work ten times as hard to reach "everyone," and you won't succeed anyway.

It's been a few years since I went to Germany, but they had a lot more of this than we did back then. I bet they still do, even the DB passenger stations had some pretty gnarly hobby shops and newsstands in the bigger cities. Munich had a giant RR bookstore, too. They are certainly incorporating the latest computerizations, etc, but it seems that they haven't lost these things to anywhere near the extent that the good ole USA has.

My explanation is that there are more trains in Germany, more RR workers, more RR fans, more RR passengers, more preservationists, more modelers per capita, etc than there are here. England or Japan ?? Somebody on this forum can tell us, I bet...

And, BTW, Thanks to Erik for a much better explanation than mine.