A few of us pack up and leave for the summer, sometimes to do other jobs, to return home and visit family, or maybe just to take an extended holiday or vacation. Others of us are simply wishing we were on those extended holidays or vacations...
I definitely fall into the latter. I'd love to leave town for a couple weeks, but with three dogs and other commitments, it's just not practical. This year, at least, y'all are stuck with me.
Thanks to everyone for their patience during that. It was not fun by any means, and I think I got about six hours of sleep over three days trying to get things restored. As promised, all paid memberships were extended by an extra week as downloads weren't working until early on Wednesday. Should this ever happen again, I did get a chance to come up with a disaster recovery version of the file download process, but hopefully we'll never need to dust that off and turn it back on.
The outage also proved the value of the Discord channel we have going... it remained completely unaffected and allowed me to field both questions as well as offer updates, and tge folks gathered there were able to help provide real-time validations as various components came back online. I still don't think it's the right place to have detailed and lasting discussions, but it certainly helped fill a gap in this situation.
Buuldibg a fresh server gave me an opportunity to do some upgrades on the foundations for a few items, and also reorganize some of the underlying management processes. When the new server was brought up, I didn't add as much CPU as what the previous one had, and intentionally have left that dialed down a bit. I also added more drive space on the OS disk to accommodate things like logging that had contributed to problems in the past (e.g. filling up the drive with logs, which in turn was causing database or web server errors/locking). So far, that newer setup seems to be holding up OK.
Now that we're a month past that, I'm glad to say that things appear to be running smoother. If you're seeing performance issues and lags, please send me a PM with the days and times you're seeing it so I can dive into logs to check on the stats.
And if you still want to create shortcut icons and do the command line entries, feel free... If you don't want the menu, there's a way to disable it and still go directly into the Route or Consist Editor if you want.
Admittedly, use of the name Launcher is a deliberate throwback to the original MSTS. Most of us bypassed it with shortcuts... and that continues to be a point of confusion today for users that forget how to get into the Route Editor (yes, there are still a few stalwarts who do not use TSRE).
Last month we had a couple of new releases from the folks at TrainSimulations.net, including some Canadian style round hoppers and a new SP heritage SD40T-2 set of "tunnel motors". Both have a story attached to them, which make them great candidates to add to anyone's collection.
In the early 70's, the Canadian government commissioned the construction of 4,000 railcars for the Canadian Wheat Board, which were built by three different manufacturers. Known as "Trudeau Cars", the Provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan also placed orders, bringing the total up to over 15,000 cars in use. Ownership and maintenance of the Government fleet was eventually transferred to CP and CN, and some cars were also sold off to shippers and short lines. Sadly, their days appear numbered, as they're approaching their 50 year service life, and being replaced by the standard curved side hoppers routinely seen across North America.
The new set released by TrainSimulations captures 25 variations, including several for each of the various Government entities, plus cars purchased by CN and CP. These are quintessentially Canadian, thus essential for anyone who runs any of the Canadian routes available in the library, from TrainSimulations or also from MapleLeafTracks. And given what we've seen from over the past 18-24 months, I'd be surprised if there isn't a Volume 2 already in the works with with short line and shipper or co-op owned cars.
The Southern Pacific was known for innovation on dealing with the issues caused by long snow sheds and tunnels on their routes. One of my favorite examples of that was their cab forward steam locomotives, so that the locomotive crews wouldn't be blinded by the exhaust or smoke (crews in the caboose were still pretty much out of luck). In the 1970's, they approached EMD to solve a problem with locomotive performance, specifically the issue of overheating. Turns out that you can't cool a radiator down with hot air... and the air intakes on most locomotives were higher up, and in tunnels, that's where all the hot air would be... The solution was to create larger intakes just above the walkways, which could pull cool air from the tunnel floors. 239 were purchased between the SP and its SSW subsidiary, and another 73 by the DRGW prior to their merger with the SP. Almost all survived into the merger with UP, but were largely retired in the mid 2010's. A few remain in shortline use, and at least two of the DRGW units have been preserved.
The SP Heritage engine pack captures several iterations, including my favorite Kodachrome, as well as "Bloody Nose" variations in both SP and SSW "Cotton Belt" liveries. They'd be at home on the Shasta Route, but also on the Green River following the 1992 merger between DRGW and SP. If you own that route, it included DRGW units with a slightly different nose and fuel tank.
The photo at the top of the page is a sad sight... it's an abandoned RS3 and two coaches just a few miles away from our new Tennessee home. The New River Railway was a former Norfolk Southern branch from near Oneida down to Fork Mountain, where the Southern Coal Company had a plant. The tourist line operated very briefly but closed in 2009 after the RS3 collided with a hyrail vehicle, and it caused enough damage that it couldn't be used anymore. The rail line was abandoned in 2012, and the rails removed just within the last couple years. Without an active business to keep the gates to the site it sits on functional, and being left out in the open, everything's been heavily vandalized, and will never leave there intact. The only things not destroyed are perhaps the trucks and wheelsets.
Hopefully that metaphor doesn't become the postscript for sites like ours. I'm fairly hopeful it won't, or at least it shouldn't anytime soon. This site is an anchor of the community, and each of you play a part of that every day.
Thanks for making us part of your day, week, or whatever frequency it is. We're glad you're here.
Jerry Sullivan