Any other good Rail Web Cams?

Trains Magazine General Discussion
1

I enjoy the Rochelle webcam, but is anyone aware of any others that are good?

I’ve found a few on web searches, but traffic seems very spotty. Any links would be great.

Happy New Years folks! [(-D][D)]

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2

I just exchanged emails on this subject, yesterday, with Mike Yuhas at Trains.com. There used to be another web cam in Fort Madison, Iowa. He suspects that it is still in operation, but doesn’t know the the address to access it.

The discussion went on to the idea of creating a new web cam. It doesn’t sound easy to pull together all of the ingredients to do one. I seriously doubt that there are any others out there. Appearently, the railroads have absolutely no desire to get involved in any such activity.

If you do manage to locate any, let them know at Trains.com, and they may be able to put it on. Good luck

3

After searching around a bit I found the Fort Madison cam. Go to www.livetrains.com and look for the link that leads to railcams.

4

If your a Member of Train orders they hav a web cam at Dunsmier and Tehapacpi Loop

5

Thanks Willy2,

That Fort Madison camera is really cool – you’re able to pan the camera and watch a train approach, pass and disappear in the distance !

Thanks again,

Mike in Philly.

6

Fort Madison used to be on here along with Rochelle a while back.

I mentioned this topic to my girlfriend, whose web locating skills far surpass mine, and she found: http://railcams.com/

7

Railcam also links you over to http://www.raillinks.com/railfan/pages/Webcams/, which, from my past searches, seems to pretty well sum up the available cams.

Putting up any kind of web cam requires several things:

  1. A good location. Any of us can probably supply a lengthy list of those.
  2. Money (see the next few items for how that will get spent)
  3. A camera. A good tilt and pan, like at Fort Madison, isn’t cheap.
  4. A server. Sometimes that’s part of the camera package.
  5. Power. This one can be a problem in some favored railfan spots.
  6. An Internet connection. This can get pricey, depending on how much bandwidth is needed to support the camera. And the location problem can be an issue as well. Even my basic dial-up is almost $200 a year. A cable modem would run you better than twice that. A dedicated T-1 or fractional T-1 can be even more. If you can piggyback on someone who already has a full-time connection (as was probably done in Galesburg), so much the better. You just have to hope that you don’t impact their business needs.
  7. A host for the actual equipment. A visit to Durand, MI, left me believing that a great location for a pan/tilt/zoom camera would be on the RR radio tower. But would they let you? The Trains cam is in the RR park pavilion. Ft Madison is on the front of the Elks Club, the Willis railcam (Galesburg, which used to be pan/tilt/zoom) is on the Willis Steel building. This could be difficult. There’s another at a museum in Illinois as well, but it’s down right now. A Holiday Inn in VA or WV uses theirs to try to attract railfans to stay there.
  8. It would probably be nice to get the permission of the railroad, although that wouldn’t be totally necessary if the cam was on private or public property in clear view of the railroad. With today’s security concerns it could be a issue, although I’ve heard nothing of any of the other cams having such problems.

So, find a sponsor and a location (

8

Muchas Gracias to all of you.

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9

I like Portland Oregon and the Rochelle as well as Galesburg. The Portland one is not operating now but will soon. As Chris Fussel is relocating the cam, he used to have it in an apartment overlooking but he moved so he built a shelter under the depot platform shelters.

10

In what month do you think that the Portland cam will be up running?