download from trainsim.com using wget

[steamonly]

This is for all you folks out there who wanted to download a 2.9 gigabyte route from trainsim.com but didn't feel like installing a download manager which may or may not work. Now 2.9 gigabytes is a lot of file, and downloading it will take me 28 hours. Could you maintain vigilance for 28 hours straight just to see that it doesn't get a hiccup?

If you are using Linux or Mac you will have "wget" included, but it works on Windows just fine using GnuWin.

The main thing to know is that people who developed trainsim.com were smart and thorough in their approach. So just grabbing the cookie and feeding it to wget will get you nowhere. You have to be smart.

1. Navigate to the "Download" page of what you want to download. This is the page with the black 'copyright' splash on it. Right-click and press Inspect (Q)
2. On the panel that just appeared, click on the tab called Media
3. Click "Download", just as you would do if you wanted to download the route
4. Once the download starts, cancel it.
5. On the right-hand side panel, there should be a new line. It appeared after we clicked "Download". Right click this line and select "Copy" > "Copy as cURL"
6. Paste the resulting sausage into a text editor, delete any mentions of --compress, replace all -H with --header and append --tries=9999 to the end; also replace the curl from the beginning of the sausage with wget
7. You are set to leave the station. Cut & Paste the result into a command prompt and execute it.

[rick]

Hi There!
Thank you for the thorough explanation as to how to do that!
Rick

[spoony1999]

Or just pay and become a first class member. You can support this great website and get faster download speeds

[steamonly]

Spoony, thank you for the recommendation but I don't have a bank account and don't consider getting one. I am also perfectly fine with downloading at 30kB/s as long as I have the time where I can realistically hit "retry" to resume the download.

Otherwise, I am replying just to share the proof that indeed it works (see attached screenshot)
resumed.jpg

[steamonly]

Update: an 503 error ("Service Unavailable") can halt your download, thank you Cloudflare, but you can resume your download by repeating the whole procedure with one difference: insert a -c after wget. This will make it continue the download as normal.