Our Campaign Blog – 1 year old today
April 11, 2009: Two young Rail for the Valley supporters hold a banner on a Chilliwack overpass, part of our Highway 1 Day of Action.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Rail for the Valley Campaign Blog!
Readership (now at 300-400 hits per day) has grown dramatically since last December, when the Campaign Blog was initially launched and the readership was… well, 0.
Here’s the very first blog post, on Dec. 8, 2008: http://railforthevalley.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/rail-for-the-valley-on-ctv/
When I first created this blog, I had in mind a place where I and others could regularly congregate and contributeAi??Ai?? – not necessarily “News” items – but our thoughts and items of interest, a place to communicate and get ideas flowing. In that regard, the blog has so far been a success well beyond my expectations.
At the time, I asked Zweisystem if he would like to be a contributor. I had no idea how quickly he would adapt to blogging, to getting debate going (and certainly not always preaching to the converted!), and how adept he would be at building our readership, both locally and in fact around the world. I know today we have visitors from every place you can imagine – to our international readers, I’m glad you have found this blog and are enjoying it!
Looking to the future of the blog, I want to keep us moving forward, and to really build an online community around our main issue, as well as other related issues. To do this, means more writers and fresh perspectives. (Zweisystem strongly agrees.)
In the new year, you can look forward to an increase in the number of “guest posts” on this blog – and if all goes well, new regular bloggers as well.
In order to achieve this, we are looking for
1) “guest” bloggers who wish to contribute one or more “guest” articles for publication on the blog
You don’t need to be an expert on the Fraser Valley, or on all things light rail. A well-written post from a personal point of view is just as good. We’re looking for both local, as well as international perspectives.
2) regular contributors, whether it be once a week, or more frequently.
If you’d like to contribute, or if you know someone else, please send an email to railforthevalley@gmail.com.
If you have a passion for the issue of Rail for the Valley, and an enthusiasm to write for us, please come forward!
Hats off to you John for starting this blog. We now have regular readers from Russia, Finland, Austria, Australia, the USA and of course the UK.
What I also hope this blog does is widen the perspective of railways and railway operation, flavoured with a little history. The recent posting of the Rittnerbahn was of an interurban railway, I did not know existed until an European reader pointed it out to me and hence the post.
The North Sea railways series was a quirky number of a largely unknown interurban style railways on small and very lightly populated islands, whose citizens made the decision to restrict cars or outlaw them completely on the islands!
The ongoing SkyTrain debate is well, an ongoing soap opera, which will not convert the die-hard SkyTrain fan, but is needed, where LRT has been made a taboo subject for almost 30 years by the powers that be.
Again, one should mention the Seattle monorail debate, which consistently has proven to be the most popular post in the Rail for the Valley archive.
2010 will be a critical year for RFV and there will be fresh ammunition to support the “Return of the Interurban.”