By Riley, age 14 (with help from Morgan)
Hi, my name is Riley. I am 14 years old, and I am on the internet. No, I did not get my older sister to make me a webpage or a Facebook entry. I use the internet to find out more about things I am interested in, like trains for instance. I was very surprised at how much information I myself could find!
I think trains are fun. In fact, most people I know agree that trains are fun. Even though many kids on St. Maarten have never seen a real train, they still think trains are fun. Guess what!? I found a website called trainsarefun.com. Yes, all one word! It is a really cool website, and it is celebrating its 25th anniversary! It has pages and pages of train information.
One of the sections on this website is dedicated to Player Development, the after school program I attend at the St. Maarten Little League Baseball Field. We do school work to keep our grades up and then we get to play. Some of us will play baseball, but we have loads of other fun things to do. We even have five model train layouts!
Since there are no real trains on St. Maarten, we needed to find a real train to model our little railroad after. We picked the Long Island Rail Road in New York as they have lots of trains, and also because we met one of the conductors from there, when he was on vacation. We call him Conductor Steve. I was excited to find out that trainsarefun.com is mostly about the Long Island Rail Road. Then I found out that I am one of the kids featured on the website, in the Player Development section!
The site is so big it has its own search engine. You could still use Google, but then you get stuff from other sites too. Best of all, if you cannot find what you are looking for, you can send a note to the website and Mr. Steven Lynch will answer your question. He will help you find the information you are looking for and even tell you about other cool stuff. We call him History Steve.
To give you an idea of just how big this website is, there are sections on Long Island Rail Road History, Equipment Roster, Documents, Maps, Photo Tours, Anecdotes, Web Links Rosters, Fan Trips and – one of my favourite parts – Horn and Steam Sounds! It’s really fun and you can learn a lot! I hope you check it out!
