State of the Site - November 2026

Can you believe it -- Thanksgiving is two weeks away....

After the beginning of the year dragging out while we awaited our house build to be complete, the last couple months have just sped by in a blink. We took a walk around the property today, and it's amazing how different everything looks from just two weeks ago when all the leaves were still up and in their full fall colors. Not today -- they're almost all down now, and we can see across the gorge, and the water is running low...

Sometime ago I mentioned making some new changes in the file search capability of our library. Among those are the ability for a file to belong to multiple sections, and better indexing by reporting mark and attributes like locomotive class.

Those have started to roll out and some are available for public preview.

In addition to the back-end changes, I've also made a few changes to the user interface to bring things up to a more current state. Results in the new setup...

There's a saying that a bad day on vacation is better than a good day at work. I subscribe to that 100%. Late last month, my wife and I escaped Tennessee, and spent a few days in Florida and then off on her favorite type of vacation... a cruise in warm waters. Normally, I'd question going in hurricane season, but it's been a tough 18 months between getting our house ready for sale, moving, and then building our current house. Even a hurricane would have been a welcome change... Kudos to the folks at Roy...

Hard to believe, but the leaves are already starting to change and drop here in East Tennessee. A year ago, we were just starting construction on our house, and with all that behind us, it's time to enjoy the important things in life: NFL football. Green Bay had an embarrassing loss in the Week 1 opener at Minnesota, but there were also a few glimmers of hope in that game, and Week 2 had an overtime win after an almost just as embarrassing first three quarters against the Jets..

Regardless...

It's been an eventful two weeks, but it seems we are definitely now back to baseline performance, and maybe a little better..

Nerd-talk warning...

I'd been using Apache's mod_evasive module to try and trap the bots, but that didn't distinguish between a page load and an image load within a page. People reading a screenshot thread or doing a file search with lots of thumbnails to display would hit the limits in place to catch the bots largely because of the image loading....

Hope everyone's having a great summer. Ours has definitely had a little adventure and drama.

We currently live above a Norfolk Southern mainline, lovingly referred to as the Rathole but officially known as the CNOTP Second District. One of our resident historians, Jerry Sullivan, spent many hours inspecting these tracks when he worked for the Southern Railroad. The railroad has been good neighbors to us, and last month they took things to a new level -- a 24+ hour bonfire, complete...

Is it just me, or has the year been flying by?... Numbers rarely lie, and yes, there's been a slight uptick in activity as we see every time schools close for the academic year... And sure enough, I noticed that the warning lights in town are dark for the school zone. Starting in a few days, we'll have a few less trips to pick up grandkids from school (they get out much later than other districts around us).

A few of us pack up and leave for the summer, sometimes to do other jobs,...

I know, I should have posted something yesterday for April Fools, but the reality of Amtrak merging with Greyhound just didn't seem too far off anymore. Nor would telling people I sold the site to SpaceX who was going to now reform this as SpaceSim.com or something with an X in it.

Truth is I've been a bit busy the last eight weeks, mostly with finishing up stuff that needed to be done around our property. After almost a year of planning and construction, we finally moved into our...

A slightly belated Happy New Year... and a happy Snowmaggedon if you happen to be in the current storm Fern's path. The site's servers should be unaffected, so feel free to download as long as you have power & internet...

I was ready to write this up two weeks ago, until the stunning loss in the first round of the NFL playoffs of my beloved Green Bay Packers to the soon to be Gary or Arlington Heights Bears, which had me in a mandatory mourning period.

That period...

I was told today (and confirmed) that FlightSim.com has changed ownership yet again, and the new owners are going to be closing down both their file library as well as their forums "temporarily"....

As someone just said to me an hour ago... Imagine the situation OUR community would be in today had we not obtained our independence three years ago...

It's heartbreaking, and hopefully the forum content isn't lost forever.

If any of you are active in...