State of the Site -- October 2023

Our week started with some sad news -- longtime community member Yuri Sos passed away after a courageous battle with bone marrow cancer, which had been diagnosed in 2019.

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...

A month ago, we were in the middle of a heat wave. Today, the leaves are already starting to turn, there's a definite chill in the mornings and evenings, and my wife's tomato crop is finally starting to slow down. Oh, and the Green Bay Packers are definitely back in action with a Week One victory at Lambeau Field South (also known as Soldiers Field...). Fall is in the air..... Heading into fall and winter usually means a couple things around here -- more new users, and people spending more "i...

On this day, we remember and honor the thousands who perished in New York City, Washington D.C, and Shanksville, PA

A new region from the folks at Run8Studios and the first route for it is Norfolk Southern (NS) Horseshoe Curve on the Pittsburgh Sub. Run from east of Altoona up and over the hill down thru Cresson on the West side

https://www.run8studios.com/pitts.shtml

Run8's NS Pittsburgh Sub East:
Route Features:
• Over 60 Miles of NS Mainline Operations
• A PDF that lists all of the trains over the NS Pittsburgh Sub
• Rose Yard
• Woodvale Yard
•...

What? It's August? NFL football is back? Where has the year gone?.... This week, my granddaughter and youngest son both went back to the classroom (starting fourth grade and senior year of college respectively), so summer is definitely winding down quickly. We've had a fairly busy summer at Trainsim as the tie gang was hard at work rebuilding the main line: the site upgrade took place allowing for a face-lift, the servers got CPU, storage and memory upgrades, and despite that, we've seen a ni...

During the past six months, I've spent a lot of time thinking over how best to protect the history that this forum represents, as well as that of other sites including UKTrainsim and Elvas Tower. As UKTrainsim.com prepares to turns off the lights at the end of the month, I'd like to recognize Matt Peddlesden and his father Peter for creating and maintaining one of the better repositories for British, Welsh and Scottish oriented content. The amount of personal time, effort and resources that went i...

Run8Studios announces that starting with V3 Update09, they are switching to a new way of updating the sim, the Run8 Updater App.

It's now available for download on the Run8Studios website's Updates page. With the introduction of the new installer, users will no longer have to download 400+ MB worth of files every time there's an update. The installer will know which files to replace and modify..

From V3 Update09 onward, your main menu will notify you when a new V3 Update...

TrainSimulations.net presents the Shasta Route, now available for purchase and download

Southern Pacific’s picturesque Shasta Route was the main artery of SP traffic north of Roseville California to the Pacific Northwest. For decades, Mount Shasta created the perfect marketing piece for SP’s passenger services, and even today, countless photos of Amtrak’s Coast Starlight include the imposing mountain in the background. TrainSimulations Shasta Route is a mid-1990’s representat...

I'm guessing only a handful of people on these forums know about Nemo. No, not the clownfish with repeatedly bad luck. I'm talking about a long-disappeared town about 30 miles west of Oak Ridge, TN. I know long-time member Jerry Sullivan (landnrailroader) is certainly acquainted with it... This week, I was able to take advantage of our hybrid work policy which affords "work from anywhere" on occasion. Today, that meant setting up shop at the table in our RV, which is currently parked at some pro...

Sometimes the best part about a catastrophe is that you get another shot to do things a little differently... As a programmer, I've always created a better product the second or third time around, and the same probably goes for most of us when it comes to our our route building, model building, or activity creation. What I didn't expect was needing to re-do just about everything I'd completed for the site upgrade on Sunday night. I'd finally gotten around to some of what are called the Day Two a...