Wiki Status Archived

March 28, 2024

Now in our 17th year and still going strong! Our Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/DARDPI.ca has been a source of great stories and images for the wiki and has become a wonderful community of friends, fans, family of rail employees and many of the old employees as well.

The result of 17 years of work is that this wiki is firmly established as the home of the largest collection of D.A.R information on the web. Quite the accomplishment for the DAR band of brothers, sisters and fans. We are currently at 6,185 images and 9,064 pages to date!

But this wiki would not exist without our tireless editors and core group contributors, past and present, who continue to add such great content to the wiki. A big thank you to them.

Steve Meredith

June 27, 2023

Yet another year has passed and this is now our 16th year. Today the server was switched over to yet another newer server for better performance. In the coming year we may have to update our wiki version too.

The result of 16 years of work is that this wiki is firmly established as the home of the largest collection of D.A.R information on the web. Quite the accomplishment for a small band of brothers and fans. We are currently at 6,185 images and 9,064 pages to date!

But this wiki would not exist without our tireless editors and core group contributors, past and present, who continue to add such great content to the wiki. A big thank you to them.

Steve Meredith

July 27, 2022

Yet another year has passed and this year is particularly of note being that it's the 15th anniversary of the creation of this wiki. There have been no tech updates since last year's wiki version update apart from the virtual machine for the web server has moved to another new computer for better performance.

The result of 15 years of work is that this wiki is firmly established as the home of the largest collection of D.A.R information on the web. Quite the accomplishment for a small band of brothers and fans. We are currently at 6,185 images and 9,064 pages to date!

But this wiki would not exist without our tireless editors who continue to add such great content to the wiki. A big thank you to them.

Steve Meredith

May 26, 2021

We're now upgraded to Mediawiki 1.35 on a Windows 2019 virtual machine server. Along with a PHP and MySQL upgrade, and an upgraded line to 300/125mbps, you should notice a huge increase in speed! Don't forget that the Forum is still a great place too and that it's also now upgraded to the latest version 3.3.2. If the forum isn't your style, meet us on the DARDPI.CA group on Facebook.

In testing the themes again especially for mobile, I found the "Timeless" theme is much improved and so I have made that the default skin again. If you still prefer Vector or Monobook, you are free to change it for yourself under your user preferences. In the future, that will be the only theme colourized as well when I get around to it.

I have to thank our tireless editors for continuing to add such great content to the wiki. If anything, it seems to have picked up over the last year and we now have 6,185 images and 9,064 pages to date!

For now, we're all in recovery mode and it's looking like the rest of the year will get back to some semblance of normality for which we can be thankful after 2 years.

January 4, 2020

As we enter yet another year, our 13th, it is time to reflect on the amazing activity for the past year. We created our DARDPI.CA group on Facebook this year in response to declining participation on the DARDPI forum and it has been very successful in seeing more participation than we have seen in many years. I still maintain that the forum is a superior way to record and keep conversations in an organized and easily searchable fashion but the world moves on and so many new members to the DAR and HSW railway fan communities find the familiar Facebook format much easier to participate in. For that I am thankful as it has led to a banner year on the wiki for new articles and images and new faces and editors. Thank you to our primary contributors and editors, Dan, Matthew, Samuel and Sarah for so much new content! From the Facebook side, many new insights and contributions are due to members like Wayne, Andrew, Bill, Nelson, Adam, Duane, Paul and many more too numerous to list. Thank you! On the side, Paul has worked diligently on the 4th version of the DAR train simulator route and is nearing completion. Highlights are an extended line on the CN Middleton branch, an extended line to Rockingham on the Halifax side and Yarmouth town fully finished and extended all the way to the CN ferry terminal. If you really want a tour of what the DAR and Western Nova Scotia looked like in the '70s, you must load this up and give it a run.

Looking forward to what 2020 will bring!

August 10, 2019

We have changed our default site scheme for computers back to the default Mediawiki Vector scheme. If you enjoyed the Timeless scheme on your computer then you will need to log in from now on and set your user preferences to the Timeless scheme. At the same time, we will maintain the Timeless scheme as default for mobile devices. If you change your scheme from the default for either computer or mobile, both of them will then use the same scheme when logged in. We are also going to be going to the cloud this year with the site(s) as we are in need of new server hardware to maintain performance and the cost is prohibitive on a retirement budget. We hope you are all enjoying the site as our editors are constantly revising and adding content to the wiki to keep it the most authoritative resource on the Dominion Atlantic Railway.

November 24, 2018

We are now online with our the new server. All the Wikis are now upgraded to 1.27.4, the Forums to 3.2 and you are welcome to resume normal editing and viewing. It was a big deal to get all 3 to the same version with all the same modifications so that apart from their content and individual formatting they are file for file all perfectly the same now. Please inform me if you encounter any trouble spots. Colour will return at a later date after I have got all my other sites transferred over and converted. NOTE: With the latest forum software version now installed, user registrations have now been turned back on so you may register yourself on the forum. READ the very bottom paragraph on this page for more information.

August 11, 2018

All the Wikis are now upgraded to 1.20.2 and you are welcome to resume normal editing and viewing. It was a big deal to get all 3 to the same version with all the same modifications so that apart from their content and individual formatting they are file for file all perfectly the same now. Please inform me if you encounter any trouble spots.

June 6, 2018

Please bear with us as you may be experiencing frequent outages on the site. Don't worry.. we're not going away but we have already converted the whole DAR DPI site to a virtual machine server and are in the process of upgrading all our wiki and forum software as well as our server version to serve the community better for the coming years. Your patience is appreciated as much as you probably appreciate an advertisement free site!

"Featured Videos" has also been moved off to the side menu. We figured it was time for change as DAR videos are rare and they have been "featuring" on the front page for a few years now. If you have any links to new DAR footage, please let us know so we can add them too.

April 12, 2018

Wow. How time flies! The whole gang is still here though and busy as ever. Samuel, Matt, Dan and myself have as usual been adding, adding, adding and of course thanks to all the contributors who let us use images of their photos and other artifacts to share with all the D.A.R. fans out there, plus our occasional editors who add even more detail to the wiki!

The copyright on the History of the Dominion Atlantic has now expired so head over to the page where you'll find a link to download the book.

The really big news is that the "Group of Ten" bought the Harold Jenkins collection, digitized it and donated the original negatives and artifacts to the Middleton Railway Museum. Those images will soon start showing up as time permits to upload them. Keep an eye out for them.

DARDPI - 10 years now! Way to go fans that without you, this would never have happened!!

Because of repetitive hacking on the site, I have had to close the automatic registration system but you can can still email me (see the bottom of the page) and I will manually add you in.

December 10, 2016

We are very proud to be coming into our 9th year on the DARDPI.ca site. The collection continues to grow and the community continues to grow and enjoy the fantastic collection of images, articles and paraphernalia that has accumulated and been donated by our ever expanding community. It helps as well and credit is due to all the museums that have been increasing the number of images on-line and who have granted us permission to show those DAR related images on the site. Thanks also to the many volunteers and contributors of images and research that continue to add depth and dimension to the story of the DAR. Cheers to the DARDPI community!

December 31, 2014

Yet another year has passed and a new year has begun. We are going into our 8th year on the web. A great year with the permission from the CSTM to add their D.A.R. photos directly onto our site. The MacIntosh photo collection continues to be added to and further extended with the addition of many black and white photos that are showing up. Many thanks to our dedicated editor members like Dan, Samuel and Matt, our constant visitors that have supported the site from the start and who continue to visit regularly and of course our contributors, many who are these same people for their on going support and participation!

December 13, 2013

The site collection continues to grow and more and more photos are surfacing that have never been in circulation before. Of particular interest to those who have followed the site all along are the final few hundred J.A. MacIntosh photos that I personally didn't have time to put up before (still in progress) and the addition by members of a growing number of B&W counterpart photos to the colour slides that he took, previously unknown. We also have many smaller collections of photos taken 40 to 60 years ago that continue to surface and are being added in by the children and grandchildren of the photographers.

There are many new entries and photos as well from our historians that continue to unearth more depth and detail from operations to train stations.

This is also the year that the digital DAR, a Microsoft Train Simulator route by Paul Charland has hit version 2 letting us take a virtual ride of the DAR from Annapolis Royal all the way through to Windsor Junction.

Thank you one and all for all your hard work and for sharing with the WWW the story of the DAR.

January 21, 2012

Many changes in the last few weeks. Created a new side menu item for the Photo Galleries and took it off the Main Page. Many new uploaded articles. Improving references and footnotes using the "Cite" extension. Added new extension for "No Titles" and started taking off titles and table of contents on Primary and secondary categories. The result is cleaner looking pages easier to read. Many new cross references and finally finished annotation all my uploaded B&W photos from my SGM-Bxxx series. A few problems with thumbnailing. the GD library won't thumbnail large photos but have been unable so far to get ImageMagick to work correctly. This is desirable so we can start to thumbnail JP2s and PDFs. More to come yet this month.

January 5, 2012

Wow. We've been on-line now for FIVE years. I just doesn't seem possible but here we are. Happy 5th birthday DAR DPI!

Thanks to all for your edits and contributions. The detail keeps growing and the granularity gets finer and finer as we fill out existing categories and add many more. We especially enjoyed the many DAR articles and current day photos of still existng DAR structures and roadbed that came in this year.

A note that a handful of new editing and performance functions have been added (and fixed) so you should find the wiki even easier to edit and upload files. Our latest additions have been extensions to allow video embedding, to control page titles, to add intelligent footnoting and multiple file uploads.

Make a New Years resolution for 2012 to upload all the material you've been planning to for the last 5 years and I promise I'll do the same!

March 28, 2011

This month has been busy. I am still trying to upload and keep very organized the John A. MacIntosh photo collection as well as scan and upload all my JAM purchases. I estimate I still have another 100 at least to go until it is finally all organized.

Additional uploads this last quarter made by Dan Conlin on behalf of Jim O'Donnell are much appreciated. Jim always seems to have the detail no one else does. A real fine addition thanks to Jim are the Truro Roundhouse Dispatch logs.

Still more more images from 1966 have arrived unannounced from Edward S. Gray that wonderfully details the docking sequence at Digby wharf and other shots from the summer of 1966 around the Digby waterfront. These are much appreciated as well!

This month also brought an upgrade to the Wiki (and Forum too) software. There are quite a few more features that can now be used and I added in an extension as well to make Footnoting a lot easier. Click on help for more details on that.

And finally, I started up a new Wiki for sister railway the Halifax & Southwestern Railway. As the two Railways shared 3 interchange points, it was a bit of a natural. As a result, those odd bits and pieces from the H&SW that everyone ended up with have somewhere to go now. I will also completely moved the Springfield Railway over to the H&SW as well being that it branched off the H&SW and not the DAR.

June 13, 2010

The DARDPI.ca site is now being hosted on my new Windows 2008 server. It's been a learning curve getting it running but I am very pleased with the performance of the server and the operating system. I also upgraded my routers and firewall to a professional level and this should also make a big difference. We are now only allowing the top 5 search engines to index the site so that will lead to better access times and less traffic. Now it's time to get back to the real focus. I am reveiwing and cross checking all the John A. MacIntosh photos and at least getting them uploaded even if they haven't been linked to any pages yet. You can see them all in the JAM Upload Section and one by one as I can link them to their proper pages and categories they will leave here.

If you have JAM photos please help me identify which ones are yours so I can also put them in your collection page. You see, in 2009 eBay no longer allowed us to see who bought items and so I have lost track of whose photos are whose after 2009.

And finally, when the JAM slides are out of the way, I have an entire photo album of B&W steam engines to scan and get on board too. Hopefully I can get a start on that by the end of the summer after I get all the JAM Photos out of the way.

October 19, 2009

Another amazing collection has come to us through Mr Ken McIlvoy. Thanks to Ken the wiki now has all the topographical maps from the 60's for all the areas that the DAR lines ran. Ken has also let the wiki have the track diagram charts that he was given by Canadian Pacific as well as some select photos and other personal memorabilia from his personal collection.

Our most sincere thanks!

Technically speaking though I was unable to put these images on the wiki in any decent detail using legacy graphic formats. The topographicals are so large and the the resolution required to decipher the track diagrams requires the use of advanced graphic formats to best show the detail required. Thankfully, multiple resolution technology is available in the public domain as a JPG 2000 (.jp2) format that will be our format of choice from now on for all super high resolution image files.

September 14, 2009

Our community and it's collective knowledge continue to grow an amazing rate. Thanks to all who have come on board over the last year and increased our image and knowledge base. An especially big thank you as well to those who spend hours, like I find myself all too often, editing pages and pouring over photo details trying to squeeze every last piece of information out of them.

Special note should be made of our increased coverage of DAR vessels, DAR colours, DAR logos, much more detail about and many additional steam locos, and on our forum side the Microsoft Train Simulator DAR layout got underway with the Wolfville to Kentville and Aldershot legs.

All I can say is thank you to all for keeping the DAR running forever!

November 18, 2008

I guess I should acknowledge that the wiki, as of October, has been up for a year. It's our first birthday! And what a great first year. Our statistics page reports that there are 446 pages that are legitimate content pages. I am particularly happy to see that as of this moment there are listed 72 steam locomotives, 18 diesels and 11 Dayliners not to mention all the passenger, freight and MOW equipment! I had always hoped it would be one of the first things that would happen and obviously you all felt the same way and made it happen.

Our stats also report that 581 files have been uploaded and there have been a total of 95,284 page views, and 9,183 page edits since DARwiki was setup. The file upload number when you thing about it is incredible that that many photos of the D.A.R. have been uploaded. I know in the next year we'll have that many again because there are almost that many that have been contributed and are waiting to be put on by yours truly!

We are still hoping to find one or two more brave individuals to help edit the wiki on various specialty subjects. With just 2 or three of us right now, we'll only continue to progress at a rather slow rate.

And with that, I shall close out this update and wish us all another fun D.A.R. year.

December 22, 2008

A Special Thanks

As the image contributions continue to come in from people's personal collections by uploads and CDs in the mail, I feel a special thanks is in order. Without these contributions the DAR Wiki would just be empty space but as the image database continues to grow, so does the history of the railroad continue to unfold. A special thanks to eBay people who outbid me but shared their winning images with the DAR Wiki as well.

John A. MacIntosh Photographer

This photographer's exceptional collection began selling in January of 2008 on eBay, being sold by his son. There may not exist another collection so broad that defines the 1950's and 60's, the period during the transition from wood and steam to metal and diesel. What is even more exceptional is that it is all in colour. Please enjoy the contributions of many eBay members who have made scans of their purchases available for all to enjoy. I can't thank you enough.

While we are still uploading sales slides of the MacIntosh photos, due to a change in eBay policy since September 2008 of hiding the winner's name, we no longer know which photos to put in who's collection anymore. Please help us to identify which photos belong in who's collection if you know.

October 27, 2008:

Passwords and usernames for the wiki are now the same as the forum. If you change your password there, it will change here too. However, registering on the forum DOES NOT automatically give you edit access to the wiki. You still must drop a line to the admininstrator and he will enable your access for the asking. See the very last paragraph on this page for more info.

NOTE: The underlining of links in this wiki is a User Preference for registered users. Please turn it on if you prefer your links always underlined. [Click here.] and select the "Misc" tab.