I want to start off with that our 2006 Trainorders.com private car excursion from last month between Los Angeles and Santa Fe, New Mexico went off without a hitch. More than half of our passengers traveled from areas outside of California, and many were repeat passengers from our previous excursions. With one exception all passengers on this trip were members of the web site. I have included a link to my photos of the trip in the event you missed them.
Trip photos link

Also check the video sharing area for some neat videos of the trip:
Video area link

PHOTOGRAPHY CONTEST
This October we will be hosting our popular annual photography contest. In the past few years we have given away thousands of dollars in cash and membership prizes. We are looking for input from our membership on what the subject of this contest shall be. Please email your ideas to newsletter@trainorders.net You may also visit our previous winners at:
Previous Winners Link

ANNIVERSARY
This August, Trainorders.com will be celebrating its ninth year of operation. It has been a great run and I am looking forward to our 10 year anniversary in 2007. I put together a nice web tour of the site. The tour includes a history page that will be of interest to those that have been around the site a long time.
Site tour link

The site has gone through a lot of changes over the years. Until 2003, most of the web site patronage was centered around California. That was because most of our membership was out of California and probably reflects that much of our traffic was driven to the site because of the two California webcams. Now we are pretty evenly split between the east and west coast.

Since 2003, the site has enjoyed 20%+ annual membership growth. This Christmas our premium membership count jumped by nearly 400 after we offered a special promotion for expired and heritage users.

This year during March and April we hit a lull. For the first time since 2003 our membership count stalled. However, in May the steam returned and we are again on the upward march forward. I also want to share that the majority of active heritage users have upgraded their memberships to full access, premium status. We are now down to around 600 active heritage only users.

We have made a lot of progress during the past three years do to the continued patronage of our membership. We have found that our success is only because our members believe in the site. Keep spreading the word as half our new members learn of the site through friends.

WEBCAM NOTICE
All three webcams have been giving us minor trouble lately. They all seem to have a mind of their own. Tehachapi seems to have a problem where every so often the pro audio system stops working. We have always been able to fix this quickly with a quick remote reboot. Hyndman has a hornet magnet and bees are often setting off the motion sensor in the camera. That is the reason for the blank videos with bugs flying around. The Dunsmuir camera decided it did not want to work anymore. Reboots did nothing. Bruce Petty our host shut it down for a while since it wasn't working. I asked him to turn it back on so I could check something out and it came back up. Who knows, but it is working.

If you notice an outage or no sound on Tehachapi drop us a note via the