The Siskiyou Route - last version/version history?

[amtrak115]

The last one I have is "setup_20210323.exe"

[dyanisus]

I doubt if anything on this route will change. When Dale quit his website, he was about 75 years old and as a former volunteer working with him, he was very disgusted that his 15 years of working on this was not appreciated more and the constant criticisms were too much for him to accept. The last I heard, he was in poor health battling cancer and heart problems and I haven' t been able to contact him in over 3 years.

Wow, I hate to hear that! I hope he was/is able to make a recovery. Thanks for the insight.

[dyanisus]

The last one I have is "setup_20210323.exe"

I thought it existed...😁. The elusive (and rare) March 2021 update. Thanks for confirming. I wish there was some way to get a copy archived. Well, c'est la vie.

[eric]

If anyone does manage to make contact with him, let him know I'd be more than happy to host the unfinished route here.

[CSXT Q-317]

A heap of lonely miles out there without the traffic mix common on the adjacent mainline (no intermodal, no unit oil, or grain, or pipe trains) makes the cause of joint development efforts of routes like this doomed from the start. You have to be a hearty soul really interested in developing low traffic lines to succeed, of which 90% of the train sim user base does not meet the standards of. Such a wide army of volunteers to help with route building is fiction.

Sounds like my Ohio Division in the time period I am developing it for. Parkersburg to Cincinnati was low density, with about 200 route miles of it. At the end of its life in 1985 it was seeing 4 trains daily 2 each way. While there is some switching you can do at Chillicothe with a grain, and paper plant. A lot of the traffic was overhead traffic. So for a person who likes to switch a lot, while you can do that, a lot of it is overhead traffic being run through trains.

This is also why I decided to start over with this and backdate the route just a bit. I also wanted to add an operational transfer table which Chillicothe had. But it would only provide just a bit more switching.

Completely understand about the 90 percent of users. In my case, recreating a line that's been gone from Southern Ohio for 30-plus years is rather a chore. So I work on it as I get the time. But I get burnt out a lot here lately as many do. The plus side there is maybe I can learn blender a bit more.

[CSRX]

That is personally why I haven't really combined the effort with anyone on the Maine Central Mountain Division route. It's 131 rail miles of single main line, one train a day. No one here cares enough to build, let alone run it someday, especially seems its based in the 1978-1982 time frame, before the abandonment.

Same goes for my EMR Mattawamkeag Sub, (2 trains a day), and EMR/MNR Millinocket/Madawaska Sub.

Plus, they are New England shortline railroads, not class 1 busy freight mains of BNSF or UP.

[dyanisus]

If anyone does manage to make contact with him, let him know I'd be more than happy to host the unfinished route here.

Well, I've tried to contact through email, but got bounced back. Both of his email accounts (personal and business) no longer exist or receive mail. Hopefully, someone can get an answer.

[jdgremsjr]

All I know is that he complained about the lack of help, but when I helped him create activities for the route. He complained and then blocked me because I put one too many rail cars on a siding and then called me an a@#hole for not following his instructions to the letter. It wasn't a pleasant experience. It is a shame too, I'm from that part of the country and I have memories of railfanning with my father on the Siskiyous before he passed

[pwillard]

Just an opinion...

I remember being a bit surprised by the sudden "I'm taking my ball and going home" attitude that surfaced when an early release was rolled out and comments started being made about sparseness and such... but now that I see that the "behind the scenes" activities were not conducive to it being a team effort, I guess we just chock this one up to being "a project that was abandoned in an unfinished state" and just resign ourselves to treating it essentially the same as "it died in a hard drive crash"... its just gone. The inability to take criticisms and the apparent difficulty working with other community members also sort of doomed this project to fail no matter how much effort had already been expended.

To many people, apparently, there wasn't enough there to be worth the download... based on the complaints. To others though, it might be just enough to please them and possibly work on as a personal project... but as mentioned, hubris won out and only a select few can modify/improve the route beyond its final state and then can't even share it if they adhere to the creators wishes.

There is no way you can put a positive light on this as a community freeware add-on for the sim. In the end, the behavior is basically the same as someone who intended to make this a commercial route add-on from the start and the route never actually reached "finished product" status where it could be sold.

I realize that I make a few statements about how things I personally create can/should be used (mainly because of bad experiences in the past) but I also feel that should I go "poof" at some point, people should have no issues or concerns about using or even modifying my work. (Granted, we aren't talking about a huge library of stuff like a whole route would contain, but hopefully you get the idea. If I'm gone... please feel free to use my stuff)

[JohnCarterOfMars]

Everything about the Siskiyou Route has been archived to the wayback machine and all downloads are fully accessible. Just pick an archive from the 2021 period. My setup file is dated 4/14/2020.

[dyanisus]

Everything about the Siskiyou Route has been archived to the wayback machine and all downloads are fully accessible. Just pick an archive from the 2021 period. My setup file is dated 4/14/2020.

This post was related to getting the latest/last version. The wayback machine has the April 2020, but does not have the March 2021 revision with the relevant, coinciding packs (engine, wagon, consist, etc). As I understand it, amtrak115 (who has the March 2021 version) and Eric are working to see if this can be archived here.

[eric]

The difference between an unfinished commercial route and this one is that it was available for so many people to download freely.

We do have a March 2021 copy of the route here but it's currently not available for download. I'd like to see if someone can manager to get concurrence from Dale to share it if possible.