The People
Office Staff:
Ray Burns: Sales & Marketing.
Steve Grande: Web Content, Author of many rail travelogues.
Shivam Surve: SysAdmin, Web Design, Technical Support.
Richard Hyde: Technical Support.
Brian Chuchua: Web Design.
TrainWeb Travel Writers:
Chris Guenzler,
Carl Morrison,
Richard Elgenson,
Lorraine Symons,
Darlene Banning,
Jack Turner,
Laurie Irving,
Doug Symons,
Fred Dunn,
Matt Melzer,
Robert Burns,
&
Kent Weatherilt.
TrainWeb & RAILnews.net Field Reporters:
Chris Guenzler, Carl Morrison, Richard Elgenson, Ray Burns & Steve Grande.
Volunteers:
Richard Hamilton, Saylor Runyon, Kristy S. and Roger D'costa.
The TrainWeb logo was designed by former Amtrak Ticket Agent, Ken Barrett.
The History
Ray Burns and Steve Grande have been working together and offering online information services since 1982.
At that time, they operated a commercial computer time-share service known as "Medcom Information Systems, Inc."
Medcom was an offshoot of Midcom Corporation (www.midcom.com),
a technical contracting & staffing firm started by Steve Grande and his wife, Barbara Cepinko, in 1979.
In 1990, Medcom began providing dial-up computer services to home users via a Bulletin Board System (BBS) called the "Medcom BBS".
In 1992, Medcom created a second BBS system named "The Liberty BBS" that provided information, forums and chat
for a broad range of liberty related topics. Liberty grew to be one of the largest Bulletin Board Systems in
the United States with thousands of subscribers and hundreds of local dial-up numbers throughout the country.
The Liberty BBS was nationally acclaimed by many publications, including being described by Boardwatch Magazine
as being one of the largest and best BBS systems in the nation.
In 1993, we obtained the domain name Liberty.com and
connected our computer systems to the internet for the first time to allow people throughout the world to
access the Liberty BBS via telnet. To this day, we still operate the Liberty.com
website. In 1993, the general public was just beginning to discover the existence of the internet and the web.
Access to the online community was still mostly through dial-up BBS systems rather than through the internet.
As knowledge of the web grew, interest in dial-up Bulletin Board Systems waned. We made a strategic decision to
redirect our energies away from the BBS and to the web instead. Rather than compete with the large number of
companies directing their energies to the general web audience, we focused on one particular area that interested us.
That area was trains.
Believe it or not, I, Steve Grande, rode in a passenger train for the very first time in September of 1995. Prior
to that time, it never crossed my mind that it was possible to travel significant distances by train in the United States.
I'm sure I heard "Amtrak" mentioned in the news from time to time, but I never realized it was a national service nor
thought it had any importance to my own life. Sometime in the early 1990s, some friends mentioned to me that they heard
that it was possible to take long trips by train and that it was even possible to travel in your own private room on the
train. That caught my interest. But, it wasn't until I heard an Amtrak radio commerical in 1995, that I decided to explore
the possibility of taking a trip by train.
My children had a five day vacation from school coming up, so I decided to explore the possibility of taking an Amtrak
trip during that vacation. It turned out that five days wasn't really enough time to go round-trip by train on the
vacation we selected, from Los Angeles to Seattle. So, we flew to Seattle, spent a couple of days there, and then took
the two day overnight trip on the Amtrak Coast Starlight from Seattle back to Los Angeles. From that moment, I fell in
love with train travel and was hooked! Since that time, I have traveled all over the country by Amtrak and logged over
200,000 miles of rail travel. Ray Burns and Shivam Surve, the other members of the TrainWeb team, have been on some of
these travels with me. Ray has developed a good working relationship with VIA Rail in Canada and has traveled on almost
every route in their network.
So, that is why we selected "trains" when we decided to concentrate our internet company into one specialization.
Since our website would feature "trains on the web", we came up with the domain name TrainWeb.com in December 1996.
We held a contest open to the public to come up with the best design for a logo for TrainWeb. Among many submissions were
a few excellent logo designs from Ken Barrett, an Amtrak Ticket Agent. The logo used by TrainWeb today is from one of the
designs submitted by Ken Barrett.
TrainWeb continued to share office space with its parent company, Midcom Corporation, in Anaheim, California, until 1997.
On September 1, 1997, we moved TrainWeb into the offices above the Amtrak Ticket Office in the Fullerton Santa Fe Depot in Fullerton, California.
In 2000, Midcom hired a new programmer who was waiting to be placed on assignment with one of Midcom's clients.
Since he had an interest in trains, Midcom had him temporarily do some work for TrainWeb. Ray and I were immediately
impressed with his programming and web design abilities and hired him full-time onto our staff. That is how
Shivam Surve joined the TrainWeb team and became our key designer for new features and new websites. Part of
his duties also includes TrainWeb's server administration.
Over the years parents would often ask us where to find railroad themed party supplies. They turned to us after they were
dissatisfied with the selection and availability of these items that were carried by regular party supply and department
stores. The owners of TrainWeb decided to explore if a significant market might exist for railroad themed party supplies.
Thus, we created TrainParty.com and our business started to grow
exponentially from there! We had to move out of our small office above the Fullerton Amtrak Ticket Office where we had been
located for almost ten years. We moved just down the street to a storefront / warehouse, but still located in Fullerton.
In less than a year, we even outgrew that location and realized that we really needed to be in a much larger warehouse
facility that was located centrally in the nation for faster and cheaper shipping to both coasts. Thus, we moved TrainWeb
to La Plata, Missouri, where we are located today! For the rest of the story, please
click here.
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