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This barnstar is awarded in recognition of your outstanding contributions to William N. Page and its related rail company and biography articles. - Niteowlneils
This barnstar is awarded in recognition of your outstanding contributions to William N. Page and its related rail company and biography articles. - Niteowlneils
Contents
1 Who am I

1.1 Childhood, Education
1.2 Part-time Jobs
1.3 A book that has impacted my whole life
1.4 Our family business and my career
1.5 Disability: Adult Attention Deficit Disorder
1.6 Hobbies and Interests

2 About Writing for Wikipedia
3 My Contributions

3.1 Railroads
3.2 Buses
3.3 Famous (and not-so-famous) People
3.4 History, Local Features, Highways

3.4.1 History
3.4.2 Local features, government, and communities
3.4.3 Highways and Roads Features

4 Vaoverland To/Do List
5 Summary

Who am I

My name is Mark Fisher, and I live in Richmond, VA. My user name is VAOVERLAND, and my e-mail address is vgn700@aol.com. I am 53 years old. I have always loved and been fascinated by trains, streetcars, buses, and cars (in that order). I recently retired from over 30 years in the bus transportation business here in Virginia. I am a caregiver for an elderly parent and another family member with a disability. I have adult attention deficit disorder. I am also a night owl.

Childhood, Education

I lived in Downer's Grove, IL when small, and have visited family in the Chicago, IL area often since I moved here in 1958 at the age of 7. We lived on the Burlington Railroad's famous 3-track main line into Chicago from Aurora. I can vividly remember the last of steam and Zephyr streamlined passenger trains, as well as the double-decked commuter trains now operated by METRA.

When we moved to Richmond, my next door neighbors dad was with Seaboard Air Line, and we went to the roundhouse, saw a turntable, etc. The arch-rival was the Atlantic Coast Line (a.k.a. Coast Line) and when they merged in 1967 to form the Seaboard Coast Line, their family moved to Jacksonville, where CSX Transportation has its' headquarters today.

I graduated from Huguenot High School in Chesterfield County, Virginia and attended some community college classes locally.

Part-time Jobs

I was more interested in various part-time jobs, both when in school, and at times during my career with buses. I transported rental cars (which tend to end up with too many in some cities and have to go back to other places), delivered newspapers (both on a bicycle and on a long motor route), worked at a small FM radio station, driven a wrecker, delivered for a drug store, driven para-transit (wheelchairs), EMS (emergency ambulances), transported rental cars (which tend to end up with too many in some cities and have to go back to other places). In those jobs, each was a combination of fun and learning.

A book that has impacted my whole life

When I was a teenager, I first read The Virginian Railway, written by rail historian and photographer H. Reid, a Norfolk native. He combined the usual information about locomotives and rolling stock customarily found in railroad books with the business strategy of the two founders of the VGN, who were each fascinating men with seemingly endless ideas and energy. These days they may have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder!

Reid's storytelling writing style included many stories told by former railroaders, who came to be very loyal to the VGN, which paid its employees and vendors a little better than absolutely necessary. The building of the railroad was a story of little business winning over big business. It was built to the highest possible engineering standards, was enormously profitable, and operated an amazingly wide range of innovative equipment.

The Virginian Railway enthralled me and has impacted my life, career, and hobby interests greatly in the 40 years since I first read it. I have 3 copies of H. Reid's epoch book, including a rare first edition, which has the best quality photographs. I still enjoy re-reading it (as do many other Virginian Railway enthusiasts I have been told).

Our family business and my career

In our family's business, which was my career for about 30 years, I now realize that my parents and I attempted to duplicate many of the values and features of the Virginian Railway, and we had a very loyal following of bus enthusiasts as employees who were attracted to our wide range of equipment types and operations.

Our company, Virginia Overland, served as a franchised bus dealer in Virginia for new buses and products of Wayne Corporation, Superior Coach Company, Amtran, Ward Body Company, Champion Home Builders, Braun Corporation, and Ricon.

Our company also operated 3 small urban-suburban bus companies, providing common carrier bus services such as local commuter service, public and private school bus transportation contract service, para-transit (wheelchair service), welfare-to-work vans, and motorcoach charters.

We were also innovative, and in the past few years, were the only private operator in Virginia to operate articulated coaches on a heavy University service.

Ultimately, after surviving many crisis, including the failure of Wayne Corporation (our principal bus dealership), and lost contracts, and downsizing substantially in the 1990s, our business was forced to close in June, 2004 when we lost our 2 biggest contracts at the same time.

On reflection, we transported millions of rides without ever having a fatality or major catastrophic accident. I believe good safety record is a more important a measure of success as longevity. And, while we never got rich (like the owners of the Virginian Railway), and we worked very hard over the years, we also managed to have a lot of fun too.

Disability: Adult Attention Deficit Disorder

I have a minor (?) mental disability: Adult Attention Deficit Disorder ( ADD aka ADHD), which was diagnosed when I was 42. I have been told that I have several specific manifestations of this.

I have what they call "hyper focus", which can be a good thing, as you can get intensely into whatever you are paying attention to. Of course, that could be a bad thing if the house is on fire and you fail to be aware of it.

On the downside, I have an auditory processing deficit. This is basically a delay in interpreting what you hear. My hearing is fine, but what I hear is often garbled initially. In conversation, about the same time I say "huh?", I figure out what is was that I just heard. Like the three-legged dog, I am told that my visual skills in compensation are much stronger than normal. Bottom line: I do better with what I see than what I hear.

Another manifestation has been more frustrating and difficult to overcome. This was diagnosed by the medical experts as a motor coordination problem. When typing, it results in transposing letters. To explain briefly, with a career in bus transportation, I know how to spell "fleet". (duh?). When I type, I can mentally envision F-L-E-E-T, but it will come out as FLETE or something like that. This occurs every thrid to fuifth word on average, like this sentanec e I am typing right now, whcih i will refrain from cleaning up (sorry).

When I manually print, the problem doesn't happen, and for years, at mt job, I had help to do my typing (in the days before computers). I actually spell pretty well, but have to go back over every single word I ever type, even e-mail. Spell checkers on a computer were a godsend for me, and help enormously, although they don't catch it when I make another word by accident or when what I come out with is beyond the suggestions.

Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated. I have tried working off-line in my word processor, but I am trained and used to an outdated one (Lotus Wordpro a.k.a. AmiPro) and it doesn't do very well with Wikipedia formatting. I someday will need to earn MS word like the rest of the world, and have been doing that some. Copying previous text and editing it also is a workaround for me. I tried voice recognition stuff 8-10 years ago before I retired, but the results were poor. Expensive software or equipment is out of the question these days, as I am one of those seniors on a very fixed income. A question I have is whether there is any type of spell checker available when we are writing on Wikipedia pages.

I would like to spend more time on composing content and less on cleaning up my bad typing which results. I would appreciate some suggestions, as I am enjoying contributing to Wikipedia!

UPDATE: On suggestion of another Wikipedia contributor, I have downloaded and started using a free program ieSpell. It is especially helpful with my Adult ADD disability. It works very well, and is greatly reducing the time I spend going back and fixing my transposition errors. I would say it catches about 90&% of the, and offers a good alternative about 75% of the time after that. Thats better than any other spell checker I have used (and there have been a "few". <gr> It works with a simple right mouse click on any input box you have open. I highly recommend the ieSpell program. 07:45, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I also want to say that anyone who thinks they have ADD or ADHD or whatever should read the book "Driven To Distraction: Recognizing and Coping With Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood" by Edward M. Hallowell, M.D, John J. Ratey, M.D. [1] I would compare reading this book at age 42 to having a car and finding the owners manual in the glove box after you turn the first 100,000 miles!!! Vaoverland 12:26, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Hobbies and Interests

I am active in some rail and bus preservation and Internet forum activities, and have been gathering research information to possibly write several books someday (?!). I participate in about 100 Yahoo groups, mostly focused on rail, bus, and local and state history special interests.

I have also have founded and moderate Yahoo groups, 3 for rail enthusiasts and 1 for bus enthusiasts. 2 of my rail groups are very active, and some of the information I have used on Wikipedia has come from others in our groups with hands-on historical backgrounds.

Some of our efforts has been used in the Virginia Standards of Learning on-line stuff for public school here! The Virginian Railway Enthusiasts Group is the most active for anyone who may be interested in what we are doing. This particular group has over 400 members and includes authors and historians, and is in top 10% of Yahoo Rail Enthusiatss groups.

The price of Yahoo groups is good (free). There is minimal advertising and no pop-ups.

I also enjoy searching the Internet, which is sort of a hobby, and works well with research for Wikipedia articles.

About Writing for Wikipedia

For my Wikipedia contributions, I am mostly focused on history and people, places and railroads, generally topics with an orientation fairly close to Richmond and Virginia.

I know that Wikipedia articles are used by teachers as a basis for school projects. When composing, I visualize school children of middle school or high school age, and I try to keep it factual and interesting to read.

It is an exciting and true story, and I would like the reader to be able to relate to some of the emotions the people involved experienced, if that is appropriate in the encyclopedia setting. However, I may have tend to overload articles with adjectives in my enthusiasm. I may need help or suggestions in that area if y'all think it is biased.

I also am more focused on content than format. One area of weakness in my contributions of which I have been made aware is that I am more likely to include an internal link thank to place one correctly. I also know very little about categories, etc. I'm open to help or suggestions to make it a better article for Wikipedia. That is more important to me than the need to change anything from the way I have done it. In other words, please HELP if you can make it better, or guide me in doing so.

I am still learning how to write for Wikipedia, and appreciate suggestions and/or edits by others.

My Contributions

My disclaimer: The listing of an article here does not mean I wrote the article, or even any major part of it. It just means I have probably contributed to it or have been involved in it in some way.

Railroads

Buses

Famous (and not-so-famous) People

NOTE: Work in progress on the following:

Of all of these, William N. Page is my most significant contribution to date and has become a Wikipedia featured article. I have been working on research on Page for several years. This remarkable man was co founder of the Deepwater Railway and Tidewater Railway, which were combined to form the Virginian Railway. While Page's partner, millionaire industrialist Henry Huttleston Rogers, has received most of the published attention for building the VGN over the years, and it was he who put up the money and obviously helped determine a winning strategy, I believe that other VGN Enthusiasts and I have come to realize that Page's role was a crucial portion of their partnership. As a featured article candidate, it had lots of help from other WP contributors, including one who went to his local libary and got some great information to fill in some gaps, which also led me to new sources, It has been an exceptional pleasure to add this man's story (and that of the building of the Deepwater Railway, Tidewater Railway, and of course, the Virginian Railway) to Wikipedia.


I am also working on a major expansion of the article on the Virginian Railway's other founder, Henry H. Rogers. Much was been written on this fascinating man, and the current WP article is insufficient in my opinion. This is talking some time, and anyone who can help, please refer to Talk:Henry H. Rogers/Draft for this work-in-progress.

Some of the information used in some articles has been reviewed for accuracy and improvements by members of Virginian Railway Enthusiasts Group on Yahoo. There are more than a few published authors who are active in the group. When I have questions, or want to verify something, I get a lot of help on content, and I have been able to share some information provided by other Wikipedia contributors back with the Yahoo group.

History, Local Features, Highways

I am a contributor and am interested in the following articles, but in most cases, others have contributed more.

History


Local features, government, and communities

Highways and Roads Features

Vaoverland To/Do List

On my Talk page, I try to maintain a list of some articles I am researching, working on, and/or intend to work on.

Summary

I am enjoying the Wikipedia writing, and welcome suggestions.

Thanks to all, Yours in Richmond, VA Mark Fisher, aka vaoverland vgn700@aol.com

last updated Vaoverland 23:37, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Contribute

Found an omission? You can freely contribute to this Wikipedia article. Edit 'User: Vaoverland' article.

Last Contributor: Vaoverland - Article Talk Page: Discussion - Image Attributions (License Page) - GNU FDL: Verbatim Source

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