Is Digital Railroad closing? Say it ain't so, Joe.

Another bit of bad news and sorry to report. Photobusinessforum is reporting that Digital Railroad is shutting their doors. There are a slew of postings on Facebook and changes to peoples jobs in their profiles. This one says "Charles left his job as CEO at Digital Railroad." That is Charles Mauzy, the "former" CEO of DRR.

Not sure the total details on this one but again we are sorry to see another one go. I can assure you Cutcaster is on solid financial ground which lets me sleep well at night. Also we are a lean, mean, fighting machine ;-)

If you are a Digital Railroad subscriber, I would be downloading all of my needed files immediately, if for no other reason than to have a backup of them (even if they do remain in operation), but also make sure that any monthly or annual fees are not billing to your credit card in the coming weeks as they are working to liquidate or sell the company. No point in throwing away your money.

UPDATE- I'm hearing Digital Railroad has been forced to suspend all operations. This archive may only be accessible for the next 24 hours. Sounds completely unacceptable to me.

Clients who have been tracking the company's downfall may have seen this
coming, but for those who might not have known about Digital Railroad's
financial straights find themselves now having less than 24 hours to recover
their photographic archives from Digital Raiload's servers.

"Everyone is downloading now and their FTP has slowed to a crawl," one
Digital Railroad member told News Photographer magazine this afternoon. It's
estimated that there may be as many as 1,900 client archives on Digital
Railroad's servers as of today.

Full story here:

Digital Railroad Cuts Staff in Half

Charles Mauzy, who was just appointed CEO of Digital Railroad in November after Evan Nisselson stepped down, announced today that the online photography service is restructuring and will be cutting back on its staff. The number of cuts has not been reported but blogger John Harrington has speculated that Digital Railroad would cut as many as 22 jobs, or roughly half its staff. Mark Ippolito, who I met at this years Picturehouse, and Tom Tinervin, who I saw speak at the Apple store in Soho, will remain in their respective roles.

This is a definite shift in their business strategy most likely to focus more on the marketplace model, which we also believe at Cutcaster was the way to go, or they are running out of money and hanging on. What was the amount of their last round of investment?

Mauzy says, "The friends and colleagues we say farewell to today have laid the foundation for our mutual success," and notes, "Our investors have tremendous confidence in our leadership team, our strategy and have renewed their financial support with additional investments in capital this month."