Mission Statement of The Bergen Network

The Bergen Network is devoted to providing transportation enthusiasts, transportation professionals, and other interested observers with a continuously expanding array of high quality transportation-related media by means of a user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing website. This site is a manifestation of my long-term interest in transportation of all kinds.

Contacting the Webmaster

You can e-mail me at any time at the following address: rmcconnell {at} oxy [dot] edu. This e-mail link is also conveniently provided at the bottom of every page on this website: click the "contact" link. 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.

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.

TBN made its debut on the internet on August 31, 2005; since that date,

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

Your Webmaster

Photo to the left: Your Webmaster in front of a San Diego Trolley Siemens SD100, November 2008.

A bit about the webmaster... 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 something of an intricate 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 and commercial aviation 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. I'm interested in urban and transportation planning, general photography, languages, a wide variety of different types of music, graphic design and typography, web programming, and traveling to new places.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to my parents, who initially sparked my interest in public transportation, and to my grandfather, who brought me on Boston transit trips during my childhood.

I'd also like to thank (in alphabetical order) Eddie Anthony, Craig Barnes, Jeremiah Cox, Anthony German, Shawn Graham, David Greenberger, Chuck Greene, Fred Guenther, Trevor Logan, Robert Marrero, Michael Pompili, Nicholas Reed, Brian Weinberg, and Chaffee Yiu, for their help and/or inspiration.

And, of course, my appreciation goes out to all the depicted transit agencies and systems that have made this website possible. Special thanks to the folks at Kenosha Transit who professionally provided me with in-depth information regarding their historic streetcar loop.

TBN is dedicated to John J. McConnell (1930-2004) and Dante Angerville (1987-2007).