Well, I can lift a corner of the veil. About ten years ago, I made the first attempts to build a model railway planning tool. I'm a professional software developer, and I couldn't find any tool that suited my needs, so I felt an urge to create it myself. At first it was bit of a hobby project, but when a first (Dutch) version was released on the Internet in 2004, it got more attention than I anticipated.

My wife (a mathematician) and I figured there was a great opportunity here, so in May 2006, 'DRail Modelspoor Software' was registered at the Chamber of Commerce. We assembled a small group of interested people around us and worked on all aspects of the product, such as coding, testing, finding sources for the track geometries, web design, manual writing, translations, hosting, and all the other things that spring to mind. We decided early to make the program code 'lean and mean', and extremely easy to maintain.

Now, we've reached the stage that most of the boring work can be farmed out, and most of the essential stuff has been automated to the extreme. So we can focus on the fun stuff like customer support and adding new features to the software. And, it seems that we made the right choices here and there as the company is growing very fast!

David.

No, we're not all in Arnhem. The work that we contract out is mainly done abroad.
But yes, the people helping us out for some particular projects mainly live around Arnhem.

David.