20 Years of Blogging

Earlier this month, I passed the 20th anniversary of Confessions of a Train Geek. 20 years of blogging! That’s a whole person!

The Beginning

My first post was essentially “hello, world”, posted on July 9, 2005.

The first “real” post was later that day, “Quebec Vacation“, detailing our family trip to Montreal and Quebec City. VIA Rail and the Quebec-Gatineau Railway… a good start.

Back in those days, I cranked out a lot of posts. Some were “housekeeping” posts, saying “hey, I uploaded this timetable” or “I added this roster page”, but most actually had content. I’ve deleted some of the housekeeping posts over the years, so the actual post count isn’t really accurate any more.

Speaking of post counts, here are the number of posts remaining from 2005 to 2018 on the Blogger platform. You can see that I was really really active through 2008-2010, then slowed down a lot. I was overdoing it.

I wrote over 2,600 posts on Blogger over those 13 years, roughly a post every other day.

Most of the posts are still there on Blogger. I’ve republished a few on my own site, and some of the old posts are broken in different ways.

I used to host my own images in a plugin called Gallery2, but I removed that years ago and it broke many of the images. I just don’t have time to fix every post.

At the start, I felt like I was shouting into the void. Nobody commented on my posts. It was disheartening.

The thing is, I didn’t start the blog to get attention or comments. I started it because I felt I had to write.

I still feel that way today. I write because I have things that I want to say. The words want to get out.

Fortunately, people read my words now.

The Big Switch

In October 2018, I switched from the Blogger platform to my own site on WordPress. There were a few reasons for the switch, but the main reason was that I wanted to own it all. My words on a platform that I run. Nobody can decide to shut it down, except for me.

I’ve been writing here for almost 7 years now.

In these (almost) 7 years, I’ve published 614 posts on WordPress – one post every 4 days, on average. I publish about half as often as I did on Blogger, but maybe at twice the quality?

These are the number of posts I made each year on this site. I slowed down a lot in 2019!

• 2025 (49)
• 2024 (109)
• 2023 (89)
• 2022 (84)
• 2021 (102)
• 2020 (108)
• 2019 (54)
• 2018 (19)

Evolution

My early posts were very informational, very documentary – I went here, I saw this, here’s a picture, then I went there. Just the facts, ma’am.

It felt right to me then. I have always had a strong urge to record things, to document, to retain, to preserve. Relating my railfan adventures scratched that itch.

I tried doing newsy posts now and then. I don’t think they worked, because a blog isn’t really timely enough and I would have had to post multiple times a day. That’s too much like work.

Over time I have evolved to a more long form, in depth look at all things trains. In part I was inspired by Eric Gagnon, in part by Greg McDonnell, in part by an urge to write things that I would like to read.

Eventually I gave myself permission to write about more than trains. Poetry and book reviews and fiction and music have occasionally made an appearance here, and I thank you, dear readers, for accepting or at least tolerating my flights of fancy.

Where’s the Cake?

This blog has become my primary creative outlet. I am grateful for the opportunity to share here for so long, and I look forward to many years of writing to come.

Thanks for reading!