R. Donald Ross started collecting railroad photographs in 1946. More than fifty years later he got a scanner, discovered the web, and turned the hobby into Don’s Depot.
Ross explains the transition himself. He had been exchanging and collecting railroad photographs for decades through railfan networks. In 1998, after buying a scanner, he began emailing scanned pictures to other enthusiasts. Tom Chandler suggested that putting them on web pages would be easier than burying everybody’s inbox.
The pages kept growing.
The result is the kind of collection that makes the old web valuable: thousands of photographs arranged largely by railroad company, with contributions from other collectors and an open invitation for visitors to send corrections and additional information.
A hobby older than the website by half a century
That timeline matters.
This was not a website created because “railroad content” looked like a promising niche. The website is merely the latest container for a project that began when Harry Truman was president.
The archive includes locomotives and rolling stock, but it also branches into regional railroads, private passenger cars, private freight cars, ships, boats, tugs, fire engines, and buses. Older pages show their age. Navigation is utilitarian. Thumbnail images open larger scans. The purpose is straightforward: identify the equipment and share the pictures.
There is a wonderful early-web sentence on the home page explaining that the original categories were replaced by railroad-company listings because some railroads “defy classification.” That is what real collections do. The material eventually breaks your first filing system.
For researchers, surviving photographs of specific railroad companies and equipment can be more useful than polished retrospective articles. For webmasters, Don’s Depot demonstrates what happens when a site grows around an existing body of knowledge instead of trying to invent one.
This archive is one of the sites in CacheRat’s broader Ancient Web collection.
Browse the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list
Don’s Depot started with photographs, a scanner, and somebody saying “put this on the web.” Almost three decades later, that advice still looks pretty good.