Yuri was a huge influence in the early MSTS community, and the tutorials on his website Steam4me.net have been used by hundreds of thousands if not millions worldwide.
In real life, Yuri spent 49 years as a practicing veterinarian, graduating from the University of Melbourne and taking on his father's practice which continues to operate today. He and his wife Sue were married for 30+ years and raised three children, now adults.
In a post to his site last year, he mentioned that arrangements had already been made for his son to keep the website site up and running (Steam4Me shares a server with the family's business), so it's good to know his legacy will carry on.
Remembrances can be left here and I'll forwarded to the family at a future date.
Godspeed Yuri, and clear signals ahead.
On a more positive note, it appears that UKTrainsim.com is also still up and running, although I'm not sure for how long.
It's not clear if the site remaining up and available is indications of a reprieve or a new owner. Posts in another forum by longtime owner Matt indicate that while he's provided payment for the final invoice, he's leaving it to the webhost to decide when they bring down.
We're now 41 days past the announced shutdown date, so enjoy the site while you can.
Another of our community websites is also under new direction/ownership as of this week.
ElvasTower.com announced today that Dave Nelson is retiring after 20 years, and passing the reins over to a new owner, Rui Fonseca, who is also a long time member of the ET community.
Dave's been a long time member our community here at TrainSim, and was a great sounding board for me when I took on managing this site earlier in the year. I know he's looking forward to a break from daily grind of running a website, and it's well deserved. Hopefully all that newfound free time will leave more time for him to be sharing progress on his Goose Island and Cal-P route projects along with maintaining a vocal presence on the OpenRails team.
As many of us participate in the conversations on both sites, I see this move as a very positive thing for our hobby.
It wouldn't be a monthly update without some comments on new features here...
File ID's have been referenced in URLs for some of the site's file library functions, but until now they've mostly been used behind the scenes by the admins and within the database.
I've decided to make them more visible for a couple reasons...
First... having a consistent numeric reference ID helps eliminate confusion over similar sounding/named files, especially if there are changes made to correct errors or the category for a file is adjusted.
Second.... and I know those of you familiar with UKTrainsim's catalog will probably appreciate this... these reference numbers make it much easier to help identify the files needed for activities and other downloads.
If you have been aware of the file ID numbers before, please know I've adjusted our file ID numbering as of earlier today, and here's why:
Some content owners have already uploaded files here that were previously at UKTS, and I wanted to make it possible for those files to keep their UKTS file ID's.
Hopefully that will make it easier if or when the UKTS library should indeed shut down as announced. I'm hoping it won't, but as I've said many times before, preservation is this site's primary mission.
If you'd like to start referring to file ID numbers in your descriptions, please feel free to do so as I won't be adjusting them further.
There's also a link to search by file ID on the Advanced Search page, which you can reach from the File Library sub-menu.
In closing... I'm glad to say the State of the Site remains good. That's made possible by all of your contributions, be it posts, screenshots, file uploads, or memberships.
We need a good balance of each, and I'm grateful for each and every one of you who find your own way to help make this site a success.
If you have been visiting with us for a while and haven't considered one of our memberships, I hope you'll take a minute to think about the value for what you've downloaded or learned here, and help make that possible for someone else discovering our hobby in the future.
In the meantime.... go have some fun, and perhaps go run a steam activity to remember our departed friends.
