Managing and supporting the railroad related content of the websites hosted at TrainWeb has been an all volunteer effort since 1996.
This website started as a place for me, Stephen Grande, to share my Amtrak travel experiences. My first Amtrak travel experience was on the Amtrak Coast Starlight, September 26-27, 1995, from Seattle, Washington, to Los Angeles, California. I enjoyed that experience so much that I ended up devoting the next decades of my life to rail travel and related aspects of trains! I did not create and register the domain name TrainWeb.com until 1996 at which point all content was moved to that website. There were two others who helped greatly in the early days of TrainWeb including Ray Burns and Shivam Surve. In 1997 we moved TrainWeb operations into an office above the Amtrak ticket office in the Fullerton Amtrak Train Station. We would continue our operations from that location until 2003. After that, we moved our operation to a different office in Fullerton until 2006 and then moved our operations to La Plata, Missouri.
Early in the days of TrainWeb, one of our major goals became providing a free online location where train enthusiasts and rail related clubs and organizations could share their knowledge, photos, news and events. To do this, we created the TrainWeb.org website. The content of TrainWeb.com would continue to be created by our inhouse staff while the content of TrainWeb.org would be created by individual train enthusiasts, train clubs and train organizations. At one point the train related websites of over 1,000 individuals and organizations were hosted at TrainWeb. Over 800 of these are still hosted at TrainWeb.
Personally, I have never received a salary or any payments for my efforts to create, build and manage TrainWeb. I assume that most, if not all, the individuals who have created, built, and manage the hundreds of individual railroad related websites at TrainWeb are also unpaid volunteers who have just done this as a labor of love for their train hobby interests.
For the past several years, I have been managing TrainWeb myself. Ray Burns passed away a number of years ago and Shivam Surve moved back to India with his family. Though my efforts will remain an unpaid volunteer effort, the web hosting is a significant cost. Along with my wife, Barbara Cepinko, we are pursuing two paths to offset these costs. We have created the TrainWeb Club which will raise funds through membership dues. We are also looking for sponsors to buy advertising on the pages of TrainWeb.
The legal entity that operates TrainWeb is Silver Rails, a Missouri registerd Limited Liability Corporation (LLC). Neither TrainWeb nor Silver Rails is a registered 501(c)3 Non-Profit Organization. Payments to either are not tax deductible. Though TrainWeb and Silver Rails are volunteer non-paid efforts that do not make a profit, we don't believe registering as a non-profit would be worth the additional administrative overhead.
To read an even more detailed history of how TrainWeb came about, click here.
