Friday, 3 August 2012

IRFCA

The Indian Railways Fan Club (IRFCA) is the internet's largest website devoted to the Indian Railways. The IRFCA is an electronic mailing list or discussion group connecting many fans particularly interested in railways in India. Mail traffic is moderately heavy, and runs around thirty to fifty messages a day most of the time.

Topics on IRFCA cover current passenger services, routes, timetables, technical details of railway operations, motive power, rolling stock, etc. It also has a large section on historical aspects of trains in India and the subcontinent.

IRFCA started with a group of rail fans discussing Indian trains in the Usenet newsgroup [1], who later decided to set up an electronic mailing list for themselves. The list was operational on 1989-08-29. The first incarnation of the list had just 9 members exchanging e-mail directly. The list was then hosted on various US university listservers (University of Maryland, College Park, Yale University, University of California, Santa Barbara) for many years, mainly because many of the members in those days were graduate students in US universities.

The list was later transferred to ONElist in 1999. ONElist later merged with eGroups, which was subsequently acquired by Yahoo! Groups. During the first ten years or so (1989–1999) the membership remained small, at 50 to 100 members, and predominantly consisted of persons in the US, with some members in the UK.

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