The IRFCA Community
IRFCA started as a mailing list but today, not only is it a lively and active electronic discussion forum, but the railfans associated with IRFCA form a vibrant community and do more than just exchange e-mail. Members of the IRFCA mailing list in a particular region may also meet in person to go railfanning at local train stations or on longer trips (by train, hiking, etc.), or sometimes just to chat about trains or watch videos, etc. Members also gather yearly for conventions! Some members are involved in restoration efforts and heritage preservation activities with Indian Railways.
Members' Pages
Many members of the community maintain their own websites. Typically these contain trip reports, photos, videos etc;
Here's a partial listing of such sites. Some of these are maintained on the IRFCA Server, while others are on third-party sites like Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, FotoPic etc; Filter for the type of web pages you are interested in:
All | IRFCA | YouTube | Vimeo | Flickr | RailPictures | FotoPic | PicasaWeb | BlogSpot
Various IRFCA members and other railfans
- IRFCA members' photos at Flickr
- IRFCA members' videos at Youtube
- IRFCA members' videos at Vimeo
- IRFCA members' photos at FotoPic
- IRFCA members' pictures at RailPictures.net
- Other IR photos at Flickr (not necessarily IRFCA)
- More IR videos at Youtube (not necessarily IRFCA)
- More IR videos at Vimeo (not necessarily IRFCA)
- IR photos at FotoPic (not necessarily IRFCA)
- IR photographs at RailPictures.net (not necessarily IRFCA)
- Web-wide list of IRFCA videos (TruVeo.com)
Rajendra Aklekar
Anamitra
I S Anand
- Railway Tidbits
- DC electrics
- DMUs
- Chennai, KK line, and more
- The Madgaon Jan Shatabdi, and the Lifeline Express
- Oddities
Vijay Aravamudhan
Nikhil Arora
Apurva Bahadur
Jay Balakrishna
Ajai Banerjee
Pal Bappa
'Benz1976'
Ankit Bharaj
Paul Bigland
Vikas Chander and friends
Mrinal Das
Karan Desai
Don Dickens
Harshu Dinesh
Zubin Dotivala
Siddhartha Ganesh
Abhishek Gopal
Akshay Gupta
Aseem Johri
Jimmy Jose
Shrinivas Joshi
Roni Kappel
M V Karthik
'KBP' (K Bhanu Prakash)
Arzan Kotval
Sundar Krishnamurthy
Vimal Kumar
John Lacey
Akshay Marathe
- Akshay Marathe's pages at Flickr
- Akshay Marathe's pages at FotoPic
- Akshay Marathe's pages at Vimeo
- Akshay Marathe's pages at YouTube
Dr Shirish Yande
Sarosh Mehta
Venky
Shashanka Nanda
Samit Roychoudhury
Karthik Nagarajan
Viraf Mulla
- WPs in Mumbai: 150-year Celebrations
- Neral - Matheran (1999)
- Wankaner and Morbi (1999)
- WP 7161 in steam (Feb. 2000)
- Wankaner Trip (Jan. 1999) (with Sarosh Mehta and Shrinivas Joshi)
- WP 7161 and W 585 steam locos at BAMY (Feb. 2000) (with Sarosh Mehta and Shrinivas Joshi)
Manohar Natarajan
Alok Patel
Nikhil Patil
Nishant Pundir
Ranjit Pendse
C G Raghuram
- Steam locomotive (WP) run at Bangalore, 2002
- Ooty (Nilgiri Mountain Railway), June 2003
- Raghuram's pictures at RailPictures.net
Vrijilesh Rai
Ranjeet Ramaswamy
- Photos at Flickr
- More photos at Flickr...
- Yet more photos at Flickr...
- And still more photos at Flickr
- Blog - The Indian Rail Fan
- Ranjeet's rail videos
S Ramesh
Aravind S
M S M Saifullah
Samar
Binai Sankar
- Railway Junction: Travelogues, picture gallery, and more on Indian Railways, Konkan Railways, etc.
- Railway Junction (alternate URL)
- Binai Sankar's pages at Flickr
- Binai's pictures at FotoPic
Rajendra Saxena
- IRSE India's Photos
- Indian Railway Service of Engineers Portal
- Indian Railway Service of Engineers Forum
- Indian Railways News
Saugata Sengupta
M Senthil Kumar
S Shankar
- A large collection of IR pictures
- IR's 150-year celebrations and other travel
- IR Showcase Exhibition
- Shankar's pictures at Railpictures.net
Sridhar Shankar
Sriram S
Sriskandh S
Suki Sheikh
Deep Soni
Sandeep Sridharan
Shishir
Prakash Tendulkar
Lakshman Thodla
Swaran Udasin
Poochi Venkat
S Venkataraman
Mani Vijay (Vijay Balasubramanian)
Conventions
IRFCA members also meet once a year for the "IRFCA Convention". These conventions are a good way to meet new members, participate in discussions, give presentations and exchange notes about IR. The first convention was held in Pune in February 2006. The second and third editions were held in Chennai and Kanpur respectively. The fourth gathering recently concluded in Bangalore on the 24th and 25th of January 2009.
Presentations from some of the IRFCA conventions are available here.
Mailing List Archive
The IRFCA mailing list was begun in 1989 and was hosted on a few different servers before Yahoo Groups. As current Yahoo Groups members of IRFCA do not have access to the pre-Yahoo messages through Yahoo Groups, the archive of the old messages is available here.
