This site is the one and only comprehensive railfan guide to Ft Wayne and surrounding areas. Inside you'll find pictures, maps, audio and video clips all pertaining to the area, past and present. Discover how the railroading scene has drastically changed over the years. Visit our discussion forums to discuss anything trains in the area. Check back often to see what has been added as we will be continuously updating as changes occur.

January 18, 2008

Wow, so much for a webmaster, huh? As you can see I havn't updated this homepage in well over a year now, since August 2006. Well I can say there's been many changes in the railroad world around Ft Wayne since then. Probably the most notable thing has been NS adding a second lead track to the Triple Crown track adjacent to the CF&E shortline yard. This has enabled Triple Crown & NS to get trains off of the mainline in the event that Triple Crown isn't quite ready for a train, which frequently happens at night when the yard is the busiest. A diagram of the new lead and how NS accesses the yard can be viewed here. A look at the west end of the yard at Mike can be found here.

August 15, 2006

This weekend the Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society (FWRHS) will host their annual Open House at the Train Town shops on Edgerton Rd. east of New Haven, IN. The showcase of the event will of course be the newly restored NKP Berhshire #765. This year they offered a limited number of time slots for people to register for a chance to actually get their hand on the throttle of the 765 and take her for a short ride on the society's track. Positions filled up fast and all are ready for this once-in-a-lifetime experience. It was also announced that on the hour, every hour, the crew will be making run-by's for people to actually see the engine come to life and steam past them. I hope to see everyone out at TrainTown this weekend, Aug. 19 & 20, for the FWRHS annual Open House.

In September the Ft Wayne based shortline, the Chicago, Ft Wayne & Eastern will begin hauling a series of "test trains" of unit coal to an eastern power plant. If all goes well and the CF&E is able to deliver the loads to satisfy the shipper, regular coal train service will begin on the shortline. It is not known at this time how many trains will be run daily or weekly, but you can be sure that the Ft Wayne Railfan will be the first place to tell you.

June 18, 2006

A new season is upon us and so it seemed appropriate to change the photo to more seasonal photo. Plans are coming together about trying to organize a day that area railfans can get together, shoot the breeze, watch some trains and have a good time. If you have any ideas including trackside locations to host an event, please visit the forums and voice your opinion and ideas. We want to consider all options to make this a great event for all to attend.

In other news NS has been replacing rail between Ft Wayne and Butler on the Huntington District. This is to allow them to be able to raise speeds on this portion of the track and to replace the rail in the slow 10mph sidings.

Honda plans on building a new midwest assembly plant and 3 communities in northeast Indiana and northwest Ohio are under consideration. Visit the thread to keep up on the latest discussion.

April 14, 2006

Updates seem to be getting smaller and farther between, but hopefully I'll start getting on the ball about changing that. I have just a handful of announcements to make this time.

The first thing I want to mention is that on Monday, April 10, our website moved to a new server at our hosting facility. I have had nothing but the best relationship with our host and to further this they actually called me up at home the other night and offered me a better deal. They have upgraded their hosting plans and allowed me to upgrade and actually save money at the same time. We are going from 10GB of disk space to 50GB and our bandwidth is increasing from 300GB/month to 500GB/month. And the price went down to $6.25/month. You can't beat that price for this level of service.

In other news, I am getting ready to bring a new audio and ATCS server online. This one will be located over in Wellsboro, IN, where the CSX Garrett Sub crosses the CN-ex GTW from Port Huron. Train activity through here is very busy with at least 80 trains a day between the two lines. It is also hopeful that we will be able to pickup the NS Chicago Line as well as the Chicago District with this location as well

Please check the Updates page for a complete list of updates.

February 27, 2006

It's been awhile since the last update. Since the last update I have changed jobs and am now the Kitchen Manager at the Downtown Holiday Inn, in Ft Wayne. In effect this means lots more time spent at work and much less time spent on the site and trackside. Although, once it warms up I'll be trackside more often hopefully.

Anyway, here's whats new. I've designed a new logo for the website, it's been placed in the forum and on the photo gallery. Oh yea, speaking of which, there is a new photo gallery on this site. It is membership only, but the good news is, if you are a current member of the forum, you're automatically a member of the photo gallery. Just enter your same username and password and you'll be on your way! I hope everybody that has the ability will build a photo gallery of their own to show off their artwork. Other than that, not much else is new. Hopefully the next update won't take so long.

January 18, 2006

I just have a couple of updates for everyone this time. Check the updates page for a listing. I have added a section on ATCS monitoring that I think more  people should know about. I'd really like to build up an ATCS network by having people that live within range of the tracks with broadband, host a server at home. All the different servers can be compiled into one *master* server and we'd be able to have excellent coverage of the area. Please email me if anyone is interested in hosting a server at their home. I will provide equipment and setup. All that is required to be in your home is a computer, scanner, and a small antenna. If anyone has a large 20-40' antenna tower that I could use, that'd be even better.

Some kind of work has begun at the east end of East Wayne Yd. Crews are adding fill dirt to raise the overall level of the field. I believe this could be the beginning of the new dispatching office that is supposed to be built this year or next.

January 8, 2006

I'd like to wish everyone a Happy New Year and hope everyone had a good Christmas as well while I'm at it. I havn't had much time to update the site the past few weeks because of the holidays, but now I've found some time to get some material updated including a few additions that were sent my way. One big step I've made is that the website is now hosted by GoDaddy.com. For you this means considerably faster downloads and a 100% uptime. I had the domain named registered through this same company and I found out they had very reasonable hosting packages available. We now have 10GB of disk space and 500GB of bandwidth per month. This is compared to the 50MB of disk space that I had available at Trainweb. True, it was free hosting and yes I could always request more space whenever I wanted, but this new hosting package is well worth the $10 per month because of the advanced server capabilities and faster connection speeds. They also have great 24/7 technical service, which I had to use when setting things up, but they were great and treated me with respect. I value this greatly and will continue to give them my business.

Anyway, I'm sure you want to know what I've updated. I've put a "New" graphic next to all the link bar links that have changes made to them as well as noted certain things on these pages that are of importance. The address for the audio server has changed, so you will want to check the page and make note of that as well.

Also new is the message forum. We now have our very own, PHP based message board. This will be forever free of pop-ups and useless other crap that comes with free hosting. You can either create an account or remain as a guest, not having to register like the old message forum. I hope everyone registers as I'll use your registered email address for any site information that I need to pass along such as outages and updates to the site. I will not spam it with every little message I need to pass along, just important stuff.

Please check out the Changes/Updates page for a listing of the changes that I've made. Thanks again for your continued support in helping me make this place what it is and what it will continue to be!

December 14, 2005

I've been working on updating the information and including all the tidbits that I've gathered from people as well as placing new pictures on the site. Check the Updates page for more information.

December 5, 2005

Welcome to the new Fort Wayne Railfan!

We have reached our first step in revitalizing this website and making Ft Wayne a destination for railfans all over. I invite you to take a look around at the new design and functionality of the site. Some of the noticeable improvements that have been made, besides the visual appeal, include converting the Real Audio and Wav format audio clips into the very versatile MP3 format. This enables people using operating systems other than Windows to listen without installing special software. The clips will automatically open in whatever default media player you use. Also converted are the video clips into the versatile mpeg format.

I believe the greatest addition thus far to the website has been the live radio feed. This lets you listen in from the comfort of your own home to the exciting action unfolding every minute in Ft Wayne. This feed is available 24/7 so feel free to listen in anytime you like, for as long as you like. Click here for information on how to listen.

I'd like to thank David Safdy for his effort and dedication to this site in creating and keeping it going for nearly 6 years. Believe me, it was no easy task.

Content Copyright 1999-2005 David Safdy

Design & Updates Copyright 2005 Greg Lavoie
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