With that, my youngest started what's hopefully his last semester at the University of North Texas this week, and my granddaughter went back last week to start her last year in elementary school. Time flies way too fast in that regard.
Heading back to school also means one of my favorite times of year -- NFL football is back. While the pre-season is not supposed to be an indicator of anything more than who makes that 53 man roster, it's still fun to see the teams back on the gridiron. My Packers looked pretty good against Cleveland, but I'm wondering who showed up in Denver last Sunday night in prime time of all places. Hopefully things will look a little better when the Ravens come to Green Bay in two days. The bittersweet end of preseason also means some 40 or so players on each roster will likely see their NFL dreams come to a quick end.
September usually means a good change in our weather -- it's currently in the high 50's overnight, and while I won't miss the summer heat or having to cut the grass every week, those colder temps mean we're just a few weeks away from dealing with leaves and the dreaded influx of Pumpkin Spice everything.
Except here. This a pumpkin spice free zone.
But for now, it's still August. Let's get on to what's been happening around here over the last few weeks...
Whether you're a fan of vintage GE's with standard cabs, or into 1980's onward to the mid 1990's, this is a must-have set.
Prior to the iconic silver and red Superfleet colors that came back in 1989, Santa Fe's long time blue and yellow livery ruled the network. It survived well into the merger with the Burlington Northern, and many continued to sport it on short lines who had purchased the nits second-hand.
While short lived, that livery has also become a bit of cautionary tale on how to never underestimate government's ability to really mess up what might be a good thing.
I know that fans of the ATSF do run deep around here, and these should look great running on just about any route situated between Chicago and California. Lash 'em up with the BN set, and you could have some very early BNSF action....
You can find it on the Store tab. Look for the nice, bright colors. They'll make you think every day railfanning is a sunny day.
Our friends at TrainSimulations have also been busy this summer -- releasing two new packs in the last month.
Per-diem cars like these were found nationwide. Some short lines made more money from the leasing out boxcars than they did on revenue traffic across their own rails. This set has 24 cars with a good sampling of roads and companies stretching from California to British Columbia.
Both sets are attractively priced at $9.99 each, which comes out to about 40 cents per car.
A while back, there was a change added to the forum's User Settings which allowed selecting a preferred region for searching, and it would filter responses so that uploads from other regions would not be shown.
Feedback from several of you suggested that this was perhaps confusing or leaving out some responses, so that was modified a couple weeks back to no longer filter the other regions out, but to instead show them -after- the responses for your preferred region.
Within the search results, paging options have been modified a bit as well:
First of all, the ability to jump to the start and end of the list is now available, which should offer a lot more flexibility in moving back and forth thru multiple pages of search results.
Next up, on the "New Files" search, there's also now an option at the top of the results to ignore the preferred region, and see all new files.
Lastly... in your User Settings, you can optionally choose to get 10, 25, 50, or 100 results per page. When the site was upgraded, the results went from 10 per page to 25. Some people wanted it to go back to 10, some people wanted more than 25.
Now you can have whichever you prefer.
Hopefully these adjustments will make it easier to find items and eliminate some of the confusion that was occurring after the region change.
If you have suggestions for other improvements or things that drive you nuts, by all means drop me a PM. With the start of "real" football in a couple weeks, I'm pretty certain to have at least a few hours here and there during a game to multi-task.
Compared to other months, admittedly there hasn't been as much in terms of improvements to the site's software to discuss, nor has TSRE development been very active.
As mentioned in my early July message, I'd the passing of my wife's father. Two weeks later, her mother also passed. Both had been in poor health, and while this was not unexpected, winding up their estate has been our main priority. Now that things have settled a bit, I'll have more time to let the pace pick up again on both TSRE and site changes.
With that, I'll try to wrap things up.
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If you're not a subscriber, I hope you'll consider the value that you may have received here either in terms of downloads, assistance or comradery. Subscribing is what helps us keep these resources up and available for others as they discover the hobby.
And as always... thanks to everyone who stops by here to check on their friends and maybe help someone new out.
It's what makes this place a community.