We had quite the celebration here in Tennessee on Saturday, with friends and family each bringing fireworks as their donation to a cookout held where my brother in law is preparing to build his new home. The donations resulted in a show almost as long as what we saw in Oak Ridge on Friday along with 30,000 or so who gathered around Bissell Park. We made the rookie mistake of going to the park and parking at the high school, which offered a great view, but we got stuck in a 30 minute traffic jam leaving. Next year, we'll probably try the nearby Kroger parking lot, which also would have had a clear view and we would have had access to snacks and Pizza Hut.
Last month had a frustrating start for many of you as users, and some late nights for me as an admin trying to keep things up... We had several days of extremely heavy bot traffic, which required some extra fences to keep them away. That blocking activity then started filling up log files on the server at a rate considerably above normal -- 15Gb per day -- which in turn created a new problem: the drive that held those log files simply ran out of free space... causing everything to grind to a halt without any warnings.
Once the log files were situated, it seems everything's been running considerably better. If you are finding additional performance issues, please let me know.
A special thanks goes out to Brandon Smith for donating the photo now being used to represent First Class Memberships on the subscription page. Ever since reading Jim Scribbins' "The Hiawatha Story" as a teenage rail enthusiast, the Skytop has embodied First Class rail travel to me more than any other car. Brandon has hundreds if not thousands of photos of the Friends of the 261 excursion fleet, and was able to find exactly what I was asking for in just a matter of minutes.
Enough about the site... let's get on to community stuff.
While I've been hoping we would hear something more concrete regarding V4, I'm sure the many fixes in this update will help tide users over for a while longer.
Run8 also released a new Mixed Freight Pack (#7) which includes two Argon gas tankers, 100 ton open hoppers in both BNSF and UPRR markings (with and without tarped loads), and Greenbrier 60 foot high-profile box cars in GATX and FerroMex markings. These models look great, and bring along the high levels of detail that we've gotten used to expect.
OpenRails is slowly closing in on v1.6 after several years of updates. Release Candidate 4 was issued this week to the development team, so hopefully this is wrapped up before next month's update.
TSRE also has a release candidate for v8.005 available, which has been in work over the last eleven months. If there are no more serious issues reported, this will be added to the file library within the next few weeks. Following this, work will begin on v8.006, which has a single goal: migrating away from the settings.txt file currently used to configure the editors, and towards being able to view and modify settings within the editor itself. I've seen too many people making small to serious errors with the configuration file that ultimately impact their route projects, so hopefully taking this into the GUI will help eliminate some of that confusion.
Sadly, we lost another long-time member back in May. Gerry Storey passed away at age 77.
Gerry was part of our community as well as Elvas Tower, was devoted to realistic train physics, and spent countless hours trying to help others perfecting his and their own include files.
On a personal note, since the ownership change here, Gerry was a valuable sounding board for some of the changes in how this site was restructured and managed, and his efforts with the day-to-day keeping things civil really helped me be able to focus on the more technical side of things. For almost 10 years prior to that, we were both moderators here as well as at ET, and we talked each other off cliffs regarding how to deal with problematic situations on multiple occasions. I'll miss him greatly...
Fortunately, that is all in the rear view mirror now. The vehicles are all re-registered, our TN issued Real ID's should be here any day now, and the land we bought a year ago has been completely transformed into two clearings where the barn will be taking shape within the next month, and our house expected to be finished towards the end of the year.
With luck, the next time I write this, I'll either be working from a new office in the barn, listening to the trains that roll thru Tunnel 24 every 20 to 30 minutes each evening, or I'll be in jail. If you've ever built a house with your spouse, I'm sure you'll completely understand that last statement. If not.... let's just say embarking on a six to eight month construction project is one of the few events guaranteed to test a marriage to the fullest. But as this is the second house we've built together, we've learned our boundaries: she gets to choose everything inside the house, and I get to do likewise for the inside of the barn. Unfortunately we do have the added challenge of living in the RV with three dogs, so I'm really counting down the hours until the barn is up and useable...
With that, I'll wrap this update up and call it a day.
Please do include Gerry's wife and those affected by the tragedy in Texas in your prayers, and thanks for stopping by.
Congratulations on your new home that will, with luck, be finished in a fairly short time. My parents, many years ago, went through the ordeal of building 2 custom homes from sketches drawn on napkins to a finished home. After those ordeals, they swore never to do that again, and they didn't. I watched their ordeals as a kid and then as a young adult. I decided that I didn't want to endure that with my wife. I've bought, remodeled, and sold several homes since, but I stuck with buying existing homes and then modifying them to our taste. Thankfully, our current home (and likely our last) suit both of us almost perfectly and we love it more than any other home that we've had, including those that we individually grew up in as kids.
Thank you for all you do in maintaining this site, especially in light of all the extra work of building a home that you must do while living in an RV.