’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the site, Not a member was posting, not even a bot. The File Library waited with downloads all clean, In hopes that a First Class Member soon would be seen.
The users were nestled all snug in their beds, While visions of Open Rails danced in their heads; And Eric in his RV, and I with my mouse, Had just settled down in a quiet, not yet finished house.
When out on the forum there rose such a clatter, I clicked on “Recent...
As many of you know, Steam4Me, founded by Yuri Sos, closed down in early 2024 following his death in October 2023. Unlike UKTS, where ample notice of their closure was provided, there was no notice, and no ability to immediately provide a new home for the many uniquely Australian routes and rolling stock. Some items were fortunately available from the Wayback Machine, but several key ones were not.
Thanks to the efforts of Peter O'Neill (ossie) and several content creators who were...
About this time, I expect many of you are ready for a nap in the big comfy chair, while others are just sitting down for their Thankgiving dinner.
This week, I'm grateful for many things...
First and foremost... I'm grateful for family. All three of our kids were our new property for the first time ever this past Sunday. Our youngest son works and lives in another state as a school teacher, and the timing just hasn't worked out for him to be able to come out here since...
September.... Football has started for real, half the teams fan bases think they are going to the Super Bowl, and some of those teams who clearly won the preseason may already be looking at being eliminated from the playoffs. But that's the fun of the game. Everyone has a chance of winning when they step on the field.
It's also a somber reminder that we're coming up to the 24th anniversary of 2,958 people going to work and not coming home to their families. With my wife and I both...
Believe it or not, we are halfway thru 2025 already... I hope everyone in North America enjoyed either July 4th or Canada Day, and came away from it with all their fingers and hearing.
We had quite the celebration here in Tennessee on Saturday, with friends and family each bringing fireworks as their donation to a cookout held where my brother in law is preparing to build his new home. The donations resulted in a show almost as long as what we saw in Oak Ridge on Friday along with 30,000...
During the time I've been managing the site, I've tried to be as transparent as possible regarding its operational and financial stability. Like it or not, there are aspects that need to be managed like a business, mainly making sure costs are covered adequately by donations and memberships.
As mentioned on a few occasions, the price of the First Class Membership has remained at $29.95 since 2012, even though the costs of running the site have changed. Some (particularly storage) have...
Yep, it's May. And I skipped the April monthly site update entirely.
To be more accurate, I wrote an update, and then the bot attacks hit (all remedied....), so I scrapped it. And then, well....... as I've found out a few times in life, God has a sense of humor.
As some might recall, my wife and I bought land in Tennessee last year, with the plan to move sometime in late 2026. In early April, our plans got moved up with very little notice, and we put our house up for sale....
I'm sure you've probably noticed some server instability over the last couple days.
There's no clear smoking gun, but what I did discover digging around is that we saw a huge jump in site access starting on Saturday. By Monday, there was 20 times as much activity...
I suspect the real issue was the access logs. When you have increased activity, logs grow accordingly.... As a log file size increases, the amount of time needed to insert each new transaction also increases,...
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..
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...
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