thebluecomet.com gone forever?

What a loss. One of the best railroad sites on the net. I think the webmaster died. The domain name is now up for grabs. I doubt anyone has backed up all his content.

Port Jervis wrote:What a loss. One of the best railroad sites on the net. I think the webmaster died. The domain name is now up for grabs. I doubt anyone has backed up all his content.

The last I had heard, the site owner was fortunately alive and well but the web hosting service on which it existed is actually what died, unfortunately taking much of the information and photographs with it. There was a thread regarding this on the NJRailfan forum a while back but I could not locate it. I agree that this was one of the best sources on the net for historical photos of northeast railroading and its' loss is truly unfortunate.

You can still get to a fair amount of the old website through the wayback machine @ archive.org. It's hit or miss on some pages. In some cases only thumbnails, but on others full images. It's not perfect, but in light of the original website being gone, you take what you can get and at least it preserved a lot of the content.

rdg5308 wrote:You can still get to a fair amount of the old website through the wayback machine @ archive.org. It's hit or miss on some pages. In some cases only thumbnails, but on others full images. It's not perfect, but in light of the original website being gone, you take what you can get and at least it preserved a lot of the content.

That's awesome, never knew it existed. Thanks 5308! (my FAVORITE Alco BTW as well)

I wonder if the site owner is aware of this?

Here's the "snapshot" I found: http://web.archive.org/web/200606101910 ... comet.com/

Archive.org by itself is a wonderful site to explore. Virtually all of the public domain content that you see people selling on DVD or CD’s is probably there if you look hard enough. Plenty of railroad video content. As with a lot of Public Domain stuff, quality can be poor, but then again it's still worth looking at.

Usually if I have an old website link saved in my Favorites folder that no longer works, I hit the ol’ Wayback Machine and if the planets align properly, can find what I was looking for.

As for 5308, it’s one of my favorites as well. I discovered it along with the 5309 still residing in a scrap yard in Illinois in 1985 and co-chaired the committee that organized the fundraiser to acquire and restore it.

Charlie