About Trains of Turkey.com

Content

This site deals with all aspect relating to the history of railways in Turkey. Railway is taken in its broad sense: narrow gauge, military, industrial, urban railways are relevant to the site. Turkey is defined as modern Turkey. Only railways within the current boundaries of the Republic of Turkey are described. This leaves out railways of the former Ottoman Empire, which are now outside Turkey, such as the Hedjaz railways. The link page recommends websites covering these railways. Please refer to this Wikipedia page regarding Ottoman railways

All aspect of railways are included, from rolling stock to infrastructure, maintenance, operation... However, priority is given to basic subjects that would constitute the core knowledge of railways in Turkey.

This site tries to stick to historical or technical facts. Politics and in particular transportation policies are not in the scope.

It is assumed that the reader has a minimum knowledge about railway technology. Such knowledge is easy to find either on the Internet or through books.

Purpose

At first, TrainsofTurkey.com was an opportunity to organize some notes regarding railways in Turkey and present them for review to like-minded railfans from the international community. This attracted some insightful comments and helped progress in building more data about TCDD. The choice of English was obvious for this purpose.

When it was launched, the site attracted also a lot of traffic from an emerging group of Turkish railfan because the Internet was nearly their sole source of information for lack of railway books and magazines at home. This was not foreseen and raised the question of Turkish as a second language for the site. After a short-lived attempt at translating everything, this option was dropped as being quite impractical. Instead, websites built by Turkish railfans are encouraged: this site content is available to them for translation. Wikipedia and its various translations emerged has the place of reference about Turkish railways.

20 years later, the site pursues the same objectives. There is still lot of weakness and missing information but this is a long-term project. Let's see in the next 10 years were we are!

Wiki Rules

This site can be edited by anyone. The following conditiond are used and understood by all contributors to this site.

Text must be in scope of the site (see content).
Contributions must be based on verifiable sources or facts.
High ethics is our motto: contribution must not infringe copyrights of sources. In particular, don't upload pictures without consent of their authors.
Respect the right of privacy of individuals.
Text must be in English (see purpose). American English is used, dates are written like 1 January 1990.
Make sure you understand the Creative Common License used to protect this site. Your contribution will fall under that licence.

The Webmaster will cancel any editing that infringe these rules and bar the IP address of offenders.

Conventions and Usage

Steam engine axle notation: the French webmaster recognising the influence of German engineers in Turkey has opted for the German notation system, also know as UIC system. This system is also immediately recognisable by readers and avoid confusion between the British wheel notation and the French axle notation.
Thus a decapod is 1E (and not 2-10 or 150!)
TCDD class notation: Turkish locomotives does not display any class number. But identical engines are numbered in sequence. This site follows SNCF practice: the first number of a sequence can be used as a proxy for an engine class number. This also conform TCDD habits in its internal documents.
For example DE24001: class DE24000
City Names: for ease and consistency, this site uses official Turkish modern spelling for city and location names, as defined by Türkiye Harita Genel Komutanlığı. Please refer to the Toponymy page for some equivalents between old European names and the modern Turkish name.

Disclaimer

"TrainsofTurkey.com" was created by private individuals for recreational purpose and reflects only the opinions of the authors. The materials on this site are intended to be for informational purposes only. "TrainsofTurkey.com" is not an official site. Turkish railway TCDD official site can be found at: www.tcdd.org.tr. The authors are not connected to the Turkish railways nor the railway industry. The site is free of advertisement and is not connected to any commercial interest. The authors contribute freely, on their own time and expenses and do not receive any sort of compensation from TrainsofTurkey.com nor it's webmaster. The domain www.TrainsofTurkey.com is the private property of the webmaster.

Webmaster comments regarding site design

The site design is voluntary kept to the minimum: simple means trouble free. Simple also means better accesibility to a wide range of users. Fancy graphics and animated pictures are simply not relevant to our topic. I am mindful about the download time and I'd rather use network ressources for actual text and pictures. The site is entirelly based on open standards and technologies. Finally, this site should be viewed properly with any browser. I only hope that the page are not too serious looking for what is only fun.

We stick to sound and basic ergonomics: very few colors are used. Outside black and white, this site only uses dark blue, red and gold. We try to make navigation simple and straightforward. Very long text is not suited to the Internet. Whenever possible, a synthetic table is substituted to the text. This might appear boring for the reader but tables are an effective way to deliver information. The text is layed out so that it can be easily read on screen or printed on a regular printer.

This site is free of advertisement. There is no perverse incentive to stick the visitor to the site.

In 2006, Wiki technology from PMwiki was introduced to allow quick updating of page without the need for an HTML editor and a site manager. This allowed productivity gain and, hopefully, entice collaborative working.

This site is hosted in Germany by Ionos (formerly 1&1). Using pmwiki-2.3.24

For advanced users, go to Site.Configuration

Site History

This site was first put on line on 1st October 2000. It comprised then a TCDD steam engines list, a railway museums review, a books list, a web links page and one big map. From 2000 to 2005, updates occurred on average every other month, usually around the 1st of the month to achieve the present result of about 80 HTML pages, about 20 maps and nearly 1000 pictures.

A major milestone was reached in February 2003 when the site was moved to it's present domain name www.trainsofturkey.com and to a Europe based host provider. It became then the reference site about Turkish rail, an easy win being nearly the only site in that field.

In September 2006, the site was transformed to include a Wiki engine based on on open source solution. It is still running on this platform which is simple, reliable and easy to upgrade as technology moves forwards.

In 2007, a gallery using again a leading open source solution was added. It made the publication of large quantities of pictures much easier. This was dropped a few years later in favor of light galleries embedded into the Wiki.

From 2008, the site updates became less substantial, moving to a maturity phase with maintenance only and less new material. As a sign of time, most of the content have been copied to Wikipedia. However, the content of TrainsofTurkey is still superior to Wikipedia

The next major change occurred in 2012 with the use of www.OpenStreetMap.org and it's suite of tools for mapping for lines and track layouts in stations. These maps are featured here as snapshots for historical reference. Now OpenStreetMap has a railway dedicated rendering www.OpenRailwayMap.org for better railway maps.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia which was launched in 2001, i.e after TrainsofTurkey, became the media of choice for general knowledge about everything, including railways. Thanks to a large pool of contributors, including the webmaster of this site, Wikipedia is become more and more relevant with respect to Turkish Railways. 2018 was the turning point were I posted more content on Wikipedia than on TrainsofTurkey.