While we've been coming down here for the last few months doing site prep, the last two weeks was particularly noteable, as we moved our RV onto the site, managed to get internet and water hookups, and almost daily deliveries from Amazon.
The first week was all work -- burning brush, bringing down a few trees, burying a septic tank and clearing a path for the BobCat to make it thru the woods to bury the water and electric lines.
We've had a few minutes for fun as well, including a bit of off-roading in our UTV, and some hiking with the dogs along the ridge overlooking the Tunnel 24 portal. I even had a chance to drop by the K-25 site where some of the Southern Appalachia Railway Museum's collection is still stored.
And then Helene showed up.
The outer rain bands ahead of the storm core started to hit us on Wednesday, which continued into Friday. It's not my first tropical storm, but it's the first one I've experienced from 400 miles inland. Our part of Tennessee did OK, but an hour's drive to the east along the North Carolina border, and the impact has been nothing short of catastrophic.
Speaking of catastrophes.... let's start with a not-so fun topic: Site Stability.
Starting in mid-September, we experienced a few events where the site became inaccessible or unusable. I take the stability of our site quite seriously, and hope you'll accept my apologies for what couldn't have been a good experience for you as members and subscribers.
The first issue was an apparent DDOS attack on our server, along with an unrelated issue which took the server offline for about three hours. The other three events we experienced all point towards what appears to have been a corrupted table within the database.
Specifically on the database, an error log which normally would be under 100kb over the course of a day was suddenly filling up to as high as 8Gb. The error logging process started taking up more and more CPU resource which would have otherwise been available to render webpages and let people browse the file library. As that error file kept growing, the time required to lock tables, and write out the errors and updates was taking so long that the database and web engine both started to experience timeouts, followed by the database engine restarting itself every 4-8 minutes.
A week ago, I took a digital chainsaw to the server to correct that corruption -- databases were backed up, deleted from the server, and restored from the backup. With MySQL, when you delete and restore, it rebuilds all the related tablespaces and files used by the database engine, which is where the corruption had been occurring.
As a DBA, dropping a database is a measure of last resort, and it's not always a guarantee that restoring from a backup will be successful.
So far, it seems to have worked -- the logfile growth issue has not resurfaced for a week. Fingers crossed again here, plus maybe a little salt over the shoulder...
Again, apologies for the downtime and poor experience during those issues.
Fortunately, September was a very good month for new payware all around.
These aren't your "let's paint a current locomotive in an older scheme" heritage units, but the real deal as they were with Erie-Lackawanna, Penn Central, Burlington Northern, and the Santa Fe.
As someone who models that timeframe, I'm really enjoying these new sets. The SD45 and FP45 are still my favorite second generation diesels, and I can see lots of opportunities for some reskins here to fit my beloved CNW, particularly with the cascade green BN and black PCRR units.
I know I don't mention Tiger/TMT as often as I do some of the other payware providers here, but that's mainly because I don't do much in "current day" train running.
If modern railroading is your preference and you haven't looked at what they has to offer, you're really missing out on some excellent options for running in OpenRails.
Their modeling is excellent, as is the assortment of roads they have equipment packs available for.
Mixed Freight Pack Six comes with two new ACF T389 LPG tank cars in GATX and UTLX markings, two carbon hoppers with CABX and ECQX markings, a 60 foot high-cube boxcar with UP markings, and a CSX line geometry car for those of you who like to do something a little different on the HyRail Solutions CSX routes.
Used with some of the previous mixed freight packs, this adds some nice variety to your mixed freights, or for those who simply like switching and building trains in the yard.
And a special congratulations to the Run 8 team -- September marks twelve years since the original release of Run 8, and it's pretty clear they're still going strong.
In addition to this recent update and the new rolling stock pack, I'm told Version 4 is still very much happening. I tried three or four different ways of getting Brad to give an idea of when that might be ready to go, but he's better than me at keeping secrets. Maybe that's why he wouldn't tell me?
Incidentally, I mentioned the town formerly known as Nemo in my opening. It, too, was destroyed by a flood in 1940. What wasn't destroyed by the waters was left to languish and was eventually abandoned. The railroad raised the level of the tracks considerably above the river, and built a new tunnel.
With some luck, rebuilding above flood level will happen along the old Clinchfield and Blue Ridge subdivisions. It's hard to say what will happen to the communities, though.
Please keep the folks affected by Helene in your prayers as they continue to dig out or dry out from the storm. It won't be an easy recovery for those parts of Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida and Georgia.
With that, I think it's time to wrap up.
As always.... thanks for everyone who makes Trainsim.com a part of their day or week -- we're glad you're here.
As for payware content for Open Rails, the BNSF Heritage SD40 pack interests me because I wanted to get the ATSF and BN SD40s but I haven't gotten around into getting them yet...