July 27, 2025

During the dark days of COVID-19, I got into scanning old magazines and books and uploading them to the Internet Archive - here's my two accounts decryption522 & decryption. It was an interesting way to pass the time. I figured out how to scan hundreds of items a day, process them so they look good and upload them in bulk to the Internet Archive via their command line tool. I got to combine various bits of computer knowledge (digitisation, storage, backups, scripting, etc) with a warm fuzzy feeling of preserving old dead trees covered in ink people were throwing out.

Lately I considered that hobby/project/task whatever you want to call it, "finished". Most of the fun was figuring out the best way to do the thing, not the thing itself and I "solved" that problem. I still have a few tubs left, mostly model railroad magazines I took in as part of a bigger collection of electronics magazines. They've been sitting in my garage for years. I have some spare time now, so figured I better get them on the Internet Archive while I'm semi-motivated lest they spend another few years in garage purgatory.

While using a guillotine to slice off the spines of the magazines I hit a staple. This happens every now and then, but this time it caused the June 1989 issue of Australian Model Railway Magazine to open up at page 32 and 33 - a double page spread mourning the loss of 4 members of the Corio Model Railway Club (click the thumbnail to enlarge).

These four young blokes were on a fun trainspotting trip to NSW when a semi-trailer jack knifed on the Hume Highway (which I assume wasn't in the same high quality condition it's in now), crossed to the other side of the road and wiped out the car they were traveling in along with two other cars, killing six people all up. An absolute tragedy.

I have no interest in model railways but when I read these obituaries I cried a little. These guys were younger than me. They are nerds and dorks just like me and my friends. They even lived just 30 minutes down the road from me in Corio/Geelong.

I don't know these people personally but if they're anything like me and the nerds I hang out with, socialising is tough. They were likely really happy and excited to be spending time with people that didn't judge them for their odd hobby. To have their lives extinguished so soon, albeit doing what they loved, hit home hard.

The way the club described each one of them - "a big man with a big heart", "caring, down to earth, fun loving person, his social commitment to the hobby is what he'll be remembered for", "he was forever clowning around but, deep down, was concerned for those around him" shows how much they meant to their fellow club members.

I wasn't that excited to scan this stuff in, doing it more out of obligation than interest, but seeing these obituaries reminded me why it's worth putting in the effort and why the Internet Archive is so precious.

Maybe the descendants and family of David Hewitt, Phil Hayward, Brian Eaves and David Lawson will find it on the Internet Archive one day (it all gets OCR'd so if you search their names it should appear in the results) and realise how much they were loved by the Corio Model Railway Club, or even learn a little bit about their friend/family member that they may not have known much about.

Rest in peace my new train loving pals, may the internet never forget you!