About Us
This site was built and is owned by On The Mark Technologies L.L.C. (OTMT).
OTMT is a moonlighting enterprise owned by certified O-gauge train lover Mark Johnson, aka MojoMark in the OGR and MTJ forums. This site combines two of the things I like to do: run trains and build software driven websites.
LegacyKLine.com was built from a copy of the K-linetrains.com website as of Mid-December of 2006, just prior to it going off line. The copy consisted of 8500 individual files.
I hosted this information on onthemarktech.com for a period of time. My intent was to keep it for my personal use and for the use of my train buddies. While I never publicized the fact that the information was there, over time it did leak out.
After Lionel acquired the rights to the K-Line brand, I received a call to stop hosting the data. So I moved the data to a personal server not accessible to the internet. I felt at the time that Lionel had to have acquired the data and would soon be making it available themselves. But In my mind I wondered if the data could be re-purposed to be a kind of K-Line collectors resource.
Then a representative from Lionel's marketing group called me. It seems that they had been getting lots of requests to make the data available and wondered if I could host the site again - with some modifications. It seems that their concerns about the old site were primarily with the contact and repair information on the site that was inaccurate. So they wanted that information removed.
Making the changes to over 4500 HTML pages wasn't a process I wanted to endure, and it would give me the opportunity to add the features and functions I thought the site needed. The trick would be to turn those 4500 pages into "data" that could be parsed to extract the metadata. Then use that metadata for the search and display engine that gave me the flexibility to easily remove the information Lionel needed to have pulled out, and then add the "community" features I thought would be cool.
So with some creativity, ingenuity, and some late nights, I built LegacyKLine.com. If you have suggestions for improvement, or run across some errors, please send me a note via my Contact page.
Sincere thanks go to Alex Weihmann who gave me some valuable feedback on the initial versions of the site.
I hope you like it.
