Moonlit Rail ™
Home Page
My name is Kristofer Karas and Moonlit Rail ™ is my personal web site — a collection of writings and resources related to my various avocations and professional interests.
Welcome!
If you are just browsing, have a look at the Site Map; it offers a more useful starting point for browsing than the front page you are reading now. Most of what is in the site map is also available directly from the site navigation menu present on nearly every page. If you are reading this via a graphical web browser in a brightly-lit environment, you can switch to a dark-on-light page theme by following the links under the "Page Style" navigation menu item.
As this site is still relatively new, there are many planned pages and resource areas not yet in existence. This front page is a wee bit spartan. Have a look at the photographic gallery. Site imagery is related to the Massachusetts Central RR.
Site News
October 30th, 2011
Movies!
At long last, the first of the Massachusetts Central motion picture sequences assembled from still frames has been completed. A web object that should be compatible with modern HTML5 browsers has been embedded in the Massachusetts Central RR page along with a downloadable clip in the industry-standard MPEG-1 format.
September 5th, 2011
Added the "Events" category to the photo gallery.
To support photographs of specific events, or specific categories of event, a new "Events" area has been added to the top-level selection of photographic exhibits. So that it is not empty, some old photographs from an air show at Hanscom AFB have been added.
August 28th, 2011
Moonlit Rail is Live!
It has taken a wee bit longer to put this web site "up" than was anticipated when work began in November of 2010. Many things that were hard-coded were converted to more modern web and database-backed technologies. Database schemata had be to created, photographs annotated, database contents populated, photo rendering libraries written, the web framework finalized, adjustments to style sheets tweaked, and a seemingly endless assortment of "little tasks" completed. Oh, yes, almost forgot: one needs to build infrastructure to physically run the site so-named.
Everything here has been written "from scratch."
November, 2010
Initial Framing!
It is late November, and the initial HTML web-site framework is just now in the process of being written. The basic PHP header/footer logic is in place, primary and alternate cascading style sheets have bee written that appear to support printing and non-graphical browsers.