Welcome to The Bergen Network... Enjoy Your Stay

Welcome to The Bergen Network, or TBN. This site made its debut on the internet on August 31, 2005; since that date, and continues to provide over 4,000 high-quality photographs of rail, bus and air transport from North America, France and China for the enjoyment of all.

Purpose Of This Site

What's the purpose of TBN? It might seem a bit hard to comprehend at first, so I've provided this short section for your convenience.

One of my major hobbies is transportation photography. I've been able to apply this to three major implementations of transit: rail, bus, and air. Another one of my major hobbies is HTML and web site design. I decided to combine these two hobbies into a website dedicated to the hosting of my growing transit photography collection -- producing TBN in all its glory.

But why The Bergen Network, you ask. What's the background behind this website's naming? Well, my home subway station happened to be Bergen Street on the F and G lines in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. I decided to borrow the name of the subway station and use it for this website. The "Network" part of the name comes from the fact that this site consists of many widespread transit subjects -- all across North America, China, France, and hopefully many more in the future -- and that they all exist in one interlinked network on this website.

Contact Information

You can e-mail me at any time at the following address: rmcconnell {at} oxy [dot] edu. To protect against junk e-mail, please remove the spaces in the address, and replace the "{at}" with a "@" and the "[dot]" with a ".".

Feel free to contact me via Facebook, if you feel so inclined. My profile can be found here.

Copyright

The entirety of TBN, with its images, graphics, text and other content, is copyright © 2003-2007, Robert McConnell. You may NOT display any of TBN's content to the public, commercially or non-commercially, without permission from me.

If you wish to distribute this website's content to the public in any way, commercially or non-commercially, please provide me with a list of the specific photos and/or content that you wish to use as well as a reason for their usage. I will generally approve of your request, within limitations. If you wish, I can provide you with the original image in either TIFF or high-quality JPEG format, suitable for printing.

Depending on the transit agency pictured, you may also need to receive permission from such pictured agency to be able to use the photo. I have no authority to grant such permission.

All I ask in return is that with the approved use of photos and/or website content, credit must be given to either myself (Robert McConnell) and/or to this website (The Bergen Network.)

Please do NOT hotlink any picture or graphic from TBN in any way unless granted permission. "Hotlinking" is defined as embedding a TBN image within the text of another website. This has adverse side effects on my website's data transfer (bandwidth) limit, and is generally considered impolite among Internet users.

Disclaimer

TBN is an independent hobby website that is not affiliated with any of the transit operators, companies or agencies that are pictured.

I have tried to provide the most correct and up-to-date information available for the date that the page was last modified. Please keep in mind that some errors and mistakes will inevitably occur.

Use TBN at your own risk. I am not reponsible for any loss or damage relating to the use of content on this website.

The websites listed on TBN's Links page are copyrighted by their respective owners. I am not responsible for any of their information [EXCEPT www.rmcconnell.com.]

Technical Notes about TBN

The first version of TBN was created using the Composer application that came packaged with the Mozilla Suite of web tools. This program took the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) approach to web design, which allowed me to physically drag and drop images and other content onto pages and change other aspects visually. However, this method of web design bloated the underlying HTML code for the various pages, and I eventually decided to scrap the entire website and start a new one.

I currently code TBN by hand, using the PHP programming language for the main frameworks of the pages; HTML, for most elements on the page; and CSS, for the website-wide style sheets. I use the free web page editor provided by Taco Software, and I upload all content to TBN using RBrowser 4.

Technical Notes about the Images

I first started taking photos in November 2002 with a then-state of the art Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P31 digital camera. This camera had two major limitations: it did not have any optical zoom at all, and its image resolution was limited to 2 megapixels. Nevertheless, I learned a lot from this camera -- and when I finally replaced it, my photography skills had improved noticeably.

In late 2003, I replaced the DSC-P31 with a Canon Powershot A60. This camera also featured a 2 megapixel resolution, but the A60's CCD was improved over that of the DSC-P31 and the pictures were much more clear and fine. The A60 also had a 3x zoom lens which I used to my advantage.

September 2004 saw the end of the A60. For its replacement, I purchased a new Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W1, with a 5 megapixel resolution and a 3x zoom lens. Unfortunately, the DSC-W1 was prematurely retired when its zoom lens got stuck, rendering the camera unusable.

The DSC-W1's replacement was a Konica Minolta Dimage Z3. With 4 megapixels, this was a slight step down in quality from the DSC-W1, but the Z3 featured a 12x zoom lens that more than made up for the marginally smaller images. I used this camera from December 2004 to December 2005, when the lens became misaligned and it was retired.

From December 2005 to the present, I have used a Nikon D50 digital SLR camera. With the almost unlimited range of possibilities that I have extracted from this powerful camera, I have taken more photos with this camera (approximately 20,000) than any one that I previously possessed. I have four interchangeable lenses for the camera that are a testimony to this camera's flexibility. Nonetheless, the D50 has started to show its age and limitations, and I plan to upgrade to either the Nikon D80 or D200 camera body as soon as purchasing one is financially available.

Most images on TBN have been taken with either the D50 or the Z3 (with a few from the DSC-W1, A60 or DSC-P31) and all have been processed with Adobe Photoshop Elements 2. The current standard resolution for images is 700x466 for maximum accessibility, although some older images may be larger.

About Your Webmaster

Photo to the left: Your Webmaster, July 2007

Now, a bit about the mastermind behind the website... my name is Robert McConnell and I am the webmaster of The Bergen Network. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, I am currently a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California.

I have always been interested in things that have a system behind them - transit is one of those things. The New York City subway has fascinated me for as long as I can remember, and in my younger days I remember taking long trips on the subway to various destinations - Jamaica, Coney Island, Riverdale, Flushing - just to turn around and ride the subway back. The R40 Slant cars then operating on the B line were my primary target: I used to stand at the long front window of these cars, watching miles of tunnels, stations, lights, signals, and elevated structures go by.

However, somehow I became less interested in the subway as time went by. Could it have been the fact that everyone thought my fascination with the subway was unusual? Perhaps. I still rode the subway on occasion, but didn't think of it as something that wasn't mundane. But there was a resurgence in my interest in summer 2000 for some reason - possibly riding the new R142s on the 2 line sparked this. I remained a transit enthusiast to this day, gaining interest in buses as well over the years.

Unlike some people (whose names have been withheld to protect the innocent,) I have interests in fields other than transit. Possibly the most significant one has been urban planning; I plan to possibly major in this in college. I enjoy photography as well; I have a digital camera and a 35mm SLR camera. I'm also somewhat of a Sinophile, as I have studied Mandarin Chinese for six years and participated in two trips to China with my former high school in 2005 and 2007. I also play the piano; I've done that for ten years and plan to go on as long as I can with it. And, of course, web design is another field; without my foray into HTML, this site wouldn't be here.