The 14th anniversary of this blog

My first post to this blog was on December 8, 2010, which makes today’s post a completion of 14 years of this activity. As of today, this is the 1730th post in this series, which seems a little unreal to me, but it must be true, because both Google and I keep track, and amazingly, I wrote them all. Whew! Certainly never expected all this back on this day in 2010. 

As I often do in the annual reflections, I have looked at the page view data provided by Google, the host for my blog. In the early years of the blog, it typically received 150,000 to 200,000 page views a year. More recently that has moved above 300,000 a year, and for this most recent year, it is at 385,000 page views. My total for the 14 years is now just a hair above 3 million page views. This is nothing compared to an internet “influencer,” but seems like a fair amount for a model railroading blog. 

The graph below is Google’s data for the past year (you can click on it to enlarge). I have no explanation for the areas of spikes in page views, but one can readily calculate that the daily average for most of these years is in the range of 500 to 1000 views a day. The two numbers at right are the page views (3.01 million) and the number of comments (2753). The drop at far right is because December isn’t complete.

Over the years, I have often received comments and questions in Google’s Blogspot process (that’s the 2.75 K number above), which appear at the bottom of each post, and that’s fine. I do respond to them. I have also frequently received questions or comments by separate email to me personally. Some of those have even generated entire posts in response, which shows that these communications can be quite substantive. They are part of what makes the blogging process interesting and fun for me.

One noteworthy event of the year was my completion of requirements for the Master Model Railroader award of the NMRA. I completed the last three achievement certificates last June, and have now been awarded the plaque as MMR  #772. I offered commentary on this, and showed the biography of me that was published in the NMRA Magazine in November, in a previous post (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/10/personal-master-model-railroader-772.html ).

The plaque was delivered to me in a surprise move at an operating session at Steve Van Meter’s layout. Here is a photo of the operators on the layout that day, with the plaque being held by me and Earl Girbovan, to my left, who is now the Pacific Coast Region’s Achievement Program Manager (taking over from long-time stalwart in this job, Jack Burgess).

From far left, the folks in the photo are: Richard Brennan, Jim Radkey, John Wiley, John Sutkus, me, Bob Osborn, Earl, Mike Stewart, Andy Schnur, Steve, Bob Rosenbauer, and Jeff Allen. The person standing behind Andy and obscured by him is Seth Neumann.

Here is a better view of the plaque itself, alongside my John Allen award from PCR’s Coast Division, as it is placed in my layout room:

Meanwhile, operating sessions on my layout have continued. On the present version of the layout, that is, the one I’ve remodeled and completed here in Berkeley, the most recent pair of sessions (for comments about them, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/11/my-latest-operating-session.html ),were the 95th and 96th sessions. I continue to feel, as do many layout owners, that the layout really comes to life and best expresses my ideas for it, when visitors operate it under my direction. I hadn’t thought this or expected it, years ago when I started work on a layout, but it’s true. And it definitely is satisfying.

The same remains true for the blog.It’s almost always fun to dream up topics, figure out what’s needed to describe and illustrate them, and then to compose a draft of each one. Sometimes the inspiration just flows, and a draft needs hardly any revision; more usually, a draft may need to be polished and refined numerous times to bring it to what I wanted to say. But it remains enjoyable.

Tony Thompson