Canadian railway enthusiast and historian Raymond Kennedy died on November 26, 2024. He was 83. The Toronto Railway Historical Association shared the sad news on Facebook.
Raymond worked for Canadian Pacific Railway for 40 years in the Toronto area.
I never met him, but we corresponded several times, mostly related to his web site, Old Time Trains.
That site is an enormous trove of information on Canadian railway history. I tried to determine how many pages it has, but all I can tell is that there are more than 10,000 URLs. It’s vast.
Archive.org first captured his site on September 18, 2000. The funny thing is that the home page doesn’t look much different today, more than 24 years later. Raymond kept adding content but I imagine he was still adding it the old-fashioned way, with bare HTML. I was glad to move away from that.
I used to say that “Confessions of a Train Geek” was the longest running railway blog in the world. That’s technically true – Raymond’s site isn’t a blog – but he had been writing about railways on the web for about as long as I had. My first web site’s capture in Archive.org is in early 2001.
Archive.org is a great resource for looking at the history of web sites. Please consider donating to its operation, as I do.
I have to be honest that the reason why Raymond and I corresponded was because he kept stealing my images.
Initially he took some images from Railpictures.NET of CEMR locomotives and used them here. They were incorrectly credited on RP.NET to someone else, but I took them. I contacted Raymond in 2015 and he corrected the attribution. He was not shy about using images.
In 2017 he sent me a nice email to say he liked my articles in Branchline magazine on the New Brunswick East Coast Railway. I appreciated that.
In early 2020, I noticed that a lot of my photos had appeared on his web site, so I emailed him to ask that he ask permission first. We had a bit of a tense back and forth but it was resolved amicably enough. He added my site to his links page and I think he stopped using my images.
In late 2023, Raymond reached out looking for someone to help maintain his site. I remember thinking about volunteering, but I chose not to respond because I didn’t feel I had the time to contribute to another site, especially at the rate that Raymond did. I look after David Othen’s web content and his YouTube channel, but there’s a big difference between being a caretaker and being an active contributor.
Raymond posted a somewhat bitter “indefinitely suspended” notice on January 1, 2024, and that was probably it for updates to his site.
It’s a great loss for Canadian railway history. I hope his web site is preserved.