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 house last week, and have been in the process of emptying out the hundreds of boxes and totes that held everything we owned for the last ten months. I'm guessing we still have another week or two of finishing that up, but being able to sleep in a real bed and cook in a full size kitchen is something you just wouldn't appreciate unless you'd lived in a camper for ten months.
The timing was excellent -- we've had crap weather most of February and early March, but since the day we got our occupancy permit, it hasn't dropped below 55F during the day. Two acres of ice rink slicked mud has dried out, and the last vestiges of the construction phase -- the big blue dumpster -- have been removed, leaving the yard fully available to start grading and seeding.
We still have a million things to do, but getting in the house was a huge milestone.
Financially, the state of the site is in a good spot. In 2025, our costs for servers or bandwidth didn't increase, but we are starting to get thin on storage. With models getting more complex, textures getting larger, and routes getting bigger, it's inevitable that more storage will be needed by mid-year.
Operationally, there were a few users affected by hiccups in February with regard to logins. After two weeks of trial and error with the vendor's support, the happy space we needed to be as far as configurations go was identified. The only downside... links which used "www.trainsim.com" became obsolete. Most sites haven't advertised themselves with www for quite a while, and the way that session management is handled required picking one nomenclature and sticking with it. Because of the www deprecation, we also had some issues with Stripe payments that took a few days to sort out.
Apologies to those who got caught up in either of those traps. I've not heard anything new in three weeks, so I assume everyone is now good to go. PM me if you're not.
Because of that instability, I did defer a planned upgrade of the board software to the most current version (6.2). Functionally, there's no new features or enhancements that compel upgrading, so I'll skip this version and wait for the next one which has added value. But it won't wait forever. One advantage of staying current is that the vendor was able to work a support ticket with me and find a fix. If we fall behind on versions, that path for assistance goes away and becomes a huge liability.
We all know what happens when software falls out of support and goes beyond end of life... Avoiding that is still a primary goal for me.
A much bigger development was mentioned in the Run8 forum here... Jason Webb of HyRail Productions has decided to retire. If you weren't already aware, he produced the Southeast region's CSX routes, and they will continue to be sold by Run8 following his departure. Seeing future development of that region potentially halted will be a big loss. I can certainly understand the desire to step back from the forge and the grind, and get back to doing other things you enjoy, and wish Jason well with his break.
Last month, it was also announced that the-train.de and TSSF.eu , the longtime home for German and other European content, would be closing down at the end of 2026. There are some moves afoot to try and take it in a similar direction as our site did, by being entirely member donation funded, but that's not something I'd bank on until we see it survive past December. Hopefully they figure it out. And if not, as with UKTS, let's be grateful that the owner gave ample warning for those who have taken its availability for granted. Now's the time to get things that you may have otherwise put off downloading.
As always, thanks for your support here and your patience as I work thru the never-ending tasks of trying to maintain platform stability. It would be easier to stop with the version upgrades, but having support from the vendor has paid off a few times, and that only happens if we stay current.
This site wouldn't be here without your contributions to the library, as well as your memberships to help keep the servers on. Thanks for all of you who make the stop here part of your regular routine. We're all glad you're here.