About us

This is a private site of a group of railway photographers. It was created from the realization that it's easy to collect a lot of photos but difficult to find photos. In the internet age it was kind of obvious to put the photos on a web server, metadata into a database and make everything searchable in a bunch of ways.

Unforunately there is no ready-to-use solution which supports all the categorization options. Therefore this page was created and originally launched in 2007. One of the key features was the Google Maps integration, something far from common at the time, and the detailed categorization with search options was also already present (albeit not quite in the current form yet).

About five years later, at the end of 2012, it was time to refresh the design and refactor the PHP code (a mess of functions and associative arrays). The result looked more or less like the current page, but without mobile compatibility yet. The functionality of the old site pretty much remained.

In 2020 the layout was rebuilt to use Bootstrap 4 for mobile device compatibility.

In 2025 the back-end was rewritten from PHP/MySQL to Java/Play Framework/MongoDB to get rid of more legacy and have a more pleasant tech stack.

Enjoy!

Contact

[email protected]	Photos by David Gubler, web site development and operations
[email protected]	Photos by Pascal Zingg
[email protected]	Photos by Christof Hofbauer
[email protected]	Photos by Michel Huber
[email protected]	Photos by Peter Hürzeler
[email protected]	Photos by Neel Bechtiger
[email protected]	Photos by Daniel Wipf

Source Code

The source code of this web site is available under the AGPL license: github.com/davidgubler/bahnbilder.ch