Hentis Rail

What is Hentis Rail

From a young age I have always liked Trains. I was either not around or too young to see the demise of the Southern Steam, or the end of the Swanage Railway or the Somerset & Dorset Railway.
I remember as a young lad my first train I recall seeing was a Class 07 shunter running from Poole to god knows where with a couple of wagons on the back. The trains we had down here in the 70’s and early 80’s were mainly Class 33/1’s Class 33/0’s and Class 47’s on Freight , Inter regional passenger trains as well as the passenger trains from London Waterloo or Weymouth. We had a 17 road goods yard with 2 access sidings which were shared as watering facilities for the Inter-regional trains, with additional carriage sidings behind Poole B Signal box (Sterte Road side).
Freight trains included China Clay, Oil, Cement, General freight, Steel as well as the occasional Nuclear Waste Traffic and I believe traffic for the local Gas Works. We also had freight for Hamworthy Goods . I started secondary school, Henry Harbin (Now Poole High School) which sat next to the railway on its way down to Weymouth. Naturally for a birthday present I was given my first camera by my mum which also sparked my interest in photography as well. So thousands of photos and a few years later we come to the present day and Poole is a former shadow of itself. The 17 road goods yard closed in the mid 80’s. Only 3 lines are now in use and these are for mainly storing failed units until they can be removed, watering steam locos and berthing of On track plant / Engineers bits. The freight has been decimated in Poole and surrounding areas. When the pipeline was built from Fawley to the Furzebrook oil depot the twice run oil trains ceased to operate and LPG trains took their place. They eventually ceased as well as military traffic to and from Wool and Nuclear waste. From the mid 90’s upto a few years ago we had a a twice weekly Sand train from Wool and a Stone train that used the Hamworthy branch for unloading. Both those trains stopped and for a few years we had no freight trains what so ever. January 25th 2017 that changed with a new weekly stone train to Hamworthy Goods. The inter regional services stopped from Poole and started and terminated at Bournemouth. The only stuff we get through Poole now are test trains, the odd engineers train, the odd charter train, a twice weekly stone train if we are lucky and the normal London Waterloo - Poole / Weymouth (and vice versa) trains.

The name Hentis Rail came about as a fictional railway company in Auran’s Trainz simulator program for the PC in the early 2000’s. The name Hentis originated from a collaboration of two surnames on a wee project my best mate and me were working on which never came to fruition. I decided to learn to build a website to show my old and new photographs of the Poole area off as well as my photos from my many rail Journeys. So in about 2003 with a huge amount of inexperience Hentis Rail was born. It was a popular site and it became really big . As did my cameras. I had various video and photographic cameras to use. I naturally chose to pay for web space and coded everything my self. I wasn't exactly happy about these Branded “photo collection sites” in fact I was very wary of them and so I should as one or two of these “famous” sites have now gone the way of the dodo as well as their photographs. My experience kinda grew over a few years as did the running of the site and the time it took to do work on it. I noted it was starting to become expensive to run as every 6 months I was getting notified that the hosting package would be going up in price. So to try and curb some of my expenses I decided to put Google Adsense adverts on the website and on my You Tube channel, I had also put up a paypal donate button on the pages to try and recover some costs and help pay for the website.
One year I had a problem with one of the bi annual bill I was charged. I asked the host if I could pay it the following month and they denied there and then. They said that if it wasn't paid by the end of the day I would lose the site. I was out at the time but decided on my walk home that I would close the site. Mainly to the fact that the web hosting company wouldn't shift in their decision and it was getting too expensive to run (nearly £200 per year, bear in mind I was only paying £20 per year when I first started). So lucky for me I had recently set up a facebook page called Hentis Rail which was planned to run side by side with the website. This obviously took on a new role when I had to close the website. This is what you see today.
Incidentally with in the first month of putting adverts on the site I was getting I was getting complaints about adverts being on the site. For about two years I was getting around 4 or 5 emails a month complaining about the adverts. Each email I replied to and asked them this one question if I were to put a donation button on the site would they be prepared to donate to the up keep of the site. None of them replied and to this date (i have just checked) no one has. Yet when the site closed and the reason were given some people came forward to help pay for the site. Bit late after the horse has bolted.

What are my plans for Hentis Rail?
Well I have bits in the pipeline and a few more albums to go up and yeah we will see how it progresses over the next year.

Well thanks for reading and if you have any questions feel free to ask them on the site. Thanks.

Photo Credit Louis Dalby