Some websites are archives because they contain old material. ARRT’s ARRCHIVES is an archive because it behaves like one: acquire another timetable, correct the caption, add the map, argue over the date of a siding, repeat for years.
Created by Arthur John Huneke, the site describes itself as an online museum of Long Island Rail Road history and a gallery of railroad photographs. Its scope is enormous. Branch histories sit beside tickets, passes, employee timetables, track diagrams, station photographs, newspaper clippings, signal information, postal history and material on related Long Island transportation systems.
The chronological history reaches back to the Brooklyn and Jamaica Rail Road and the formation of the Long Island Rail Road in the 1830s. From there the site branches—appropriately—into the messy corporate and physical history of individual lines, extensions, stations and abandoned routes.
The Wading River material shows the site’s method especially well. Historical photographs are compared against track plans and later views. Contributors point out errors, and the page records the correction instead of silently pretending it was always right. One discussion uses a SUNY map and track changes to narrow the date of a photograph that initially looked older.
That is excellent amateur historiography. The object is not to look authoritative. The object is to get closer to the answer.
The site is dedicated in part to railroad historians William D. Slade and Robert M. Emery, and it clearly belongs to a chain of preservation rather than a single author working in isolation. Photos, maps and corrections arrive from other researchers, then become part of the public reference.
The visual design is maximal old web: huge pages, capital letters, images everywhere and links that keep opening new historical tunnels. A modern information architect would probably break it into a database. Doing so might improve search while losing some of the feeling that you are rummaging through somebody’s railroad room.
Browse ARRT’s ARRCHIVES when you have time to get lost. It demonstrates what the independent web does unusually well: preserve local history at a level of detail no general encyclopedia has any reason to attempt.