Allan Lownsborough's next release is the SAR 720 class steam locomotive.

Click on the links in the paragraph above or find these superb locos in the steam category in the tabs at top of screen.

A note for users of Internet Explorer v8: if the pages are not displaying correctly, click on Tools and select Compatibility View. This should ensure that the page display as intended. Users of Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari will have no such display issues.

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Allan Lownsborough's been busy - but not with a route, he's been building a huge array of SAR broad- and narrow-gauge steam locomotives and rolling stock. These will be released over the next few weeks.

Today we start with the mighty SAR 600 class steam locomotive and a collection of SAR TA class tank cars.

Click on the links in the paragraph above or find these items in their respective categories in the tabs at top of screen.

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It's been years in the making, it's "bigger than Ben Hur", it's the NSW North-Western Route v1: covering a vast area of north-western NSW. There is a total of 753 miles (1205 km) of main line track in this route. This version contains the Main North line from East Maitland to Armidale (238 miles), and the Merriwa Branch from Muswellbrook to Merriwa (51 miles).

Other unfinished lines are in place within the route; in some sections some scenery has been placed, but no interactives are placed on these sections: these will be completed in future versions.

Click on the "Routes" tab above to move to the "Routes" page for more information and download information.

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Visitors to this site over the past 24 hours have noted that there was a banner reading "This Site Has Been Suspended". Contrary to mischievious comments on flame-sim.com, the outage was not the result of me not having paid my bills! The site is paid up to the 1 March 2011. (Mind you, I have now set up a "Donate" button to enable the many users who have indicated that they wished to help keep the site alive to do so: many thanks to those of you who have already done so).

The outage was caused by a person or persons unknown mounting an attack on the web site which caused the host's servers to crash due to overload. As with most web hosts, economy hosting means that you share server space with other web sites, so the steam4me site was taken off-line to minimise the effects of the attack on other customers of the host.

Going forward, future major releases of large files such as routes will be hosted by file-sharing site, hotfile.com. This will ensure that there will be less impact on the host's servers and avoid a repeat of the "suspension of service" issues. This appears to be one of the better file-sharing sites and permits the hosting of individual files up to 2G in size (other hosts such as Rapidshare limit the size of files that can be downloaded by casual users).

Bandwidth consumed for the month of June: 212G

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Work on the site continues. Many of James Brook's models are now on the site. Let me know what models you require that are not back yet.

There have also been many kind offers of financial assistance on MSTS user forums (most notably on the overseas uktrainsim and trainsim.com forums) to defray the ongoing hosting expenses associated with this website. As all the tutorials are now returned, I've set up a Paypal donate button on the sidebar and would invite visitors to make a donation if you think this site has been of value to you. Do note that Paypal will not register/accept donations of less than $2.

I've contacted "ChangeDetection" over the past month in an attempt to transfer the 100 or so visitors watching the old Railpage steam4me site to watching this site. Unfortunately, no success: there is no provision for webmasters to change the URL being watched, so if you want to watch for changes on this page, you'll need to enter your email again in the left sidebar.

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Work on the site continues. Many of James Brook's models are now on the site. Let me know what models you require that are not back yet.

Bandwidth consumed for the month of June: 207G

Work on the site continues. Most Freight Vehicles have now been returned.

Bandwidth consumed for the month of May: 157G

The Open Rails team is pleased to announce the next demonstration of the updated Open Rails software will be made available to the public on May 27 at 6pm Australian Eastern Standard Time.

This release includes highly detailed daytime and nighttime skies, rain, and snow along with other environmental features, updated authentic steam locomotive physics, and other enhancements. A guide to the software is also included. The demonstration release of Open Rails software makes no changes to any MSTS content. Please note that like any demonstration software, many features will be missing. Periodic releases of the software demonstrating key features to the train simulator community are an important way to share our continuing progress as well as establish a context for two-way communication.

Download the latest build at http://www.openrails.org/release.html. Scroll down the page to the blue highlighted button in the "Development Release" section.

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Finally, after many hours' work, all tutorials (over 150 HTML pages' worth) are now available for your education and assistance. They represent a huge store of research and knowledge about the game many of us seem to be addicted to: the authors have shared their knowledge and work generously for the whole MSTS community.

Over 110 tutorial pages are now back online. In addition, I'm replacing freight and passenger stock daily. Over 119G of bandwidth was consumed in the month of April alone.

Seventy tutorials have now been returned to the tutorials section of the site. All but two routes have been returned. The visitor count was close to 18,000 this month and over 70G of bandwidth was consumed in the month of March alone.

I believe that the steam4me site is already better/faster than before and the demise of Railpage has enabled the bringing together of two other fine modellers onto the one site:

1. Brian Bere-Streeter has taken some space on the site and will be hosting his own fine models there: visit http://shortnorth.steam4me.net to see his progress.
    
2. The fastidiously crafted models of James Brook are coming back as well: James is forwarding his models to me and I'm honoured and proud to host his fine models for him on this site. You'll be able to find his models in each of the rolling stock categories as they return.

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The 12-chapter tutorial by Richard Osborne is now uploaded and availabel from the tutorials site. Along with other completed tutorials, the tutorial count is now up to 50.

The visitor count clicked over 2,800,000 late this evening.

I've collated the error messages that were scattered all over my previous site and assembled them together on their own page linked from the menu bar at top (I rank their importance second only to the Tutorials). If I've left out any error messages I'd be pleased to add them to the collection.

Over 50% of the site (measured in data, that is - about 3.2G) has been uploaded and is availaable for download. This probably sounds better than saying the percentage number of files returned as the first files back were are the routes - not many files, but all quite large data files in themselves.

Tutorial count is now 25.

I've had some PMs and emails asking if they can donate funds to help defray some of the costs of keeping this site going. I will be setting up a "donate" button once the vast majority of tutorials are back - I can't really ask for donations on the basis of promises (never believed in "vapourware!").

Latest tutorials returned by request were the full set of sound tutorials. Latest requests: modelling in GMax, so these'll be next.

It's been a roller-coaster six weeks since the site (along with the whole of Railpage) went "off-air" on or about Friday 22 January 2010. At first it was believed that there was some hardware issue with the servers and that it would only be a matter of time before everything was back on-line. I was more concerned than that as CEO of DigitalRiver, Brian Evans, had told me in October that the steam4me site had been moved to its own faster server and was less likely to be affected by Railpage's outages.

But by 20 February, it became clear that Railpage's servers had been turned off and Railpage sysadmins were not able to physically access the servers in their current secure location. A statement by James "webslave" Morgan stated

"During Brian's leave one or more of the directors at Digital River took issue with the hosting arrangement for Railpage. (You may recall that Digital River has provided very cheap hosting for us for a number of years) At this point it seems like there has been a falling-out between some of the DR directors.

"We thank our members for their ongoing understanding during this difficult time and apologize for the need for confidentiality during the early stages of this issue. I hope that many of you will understand why this was a necessity."

At that point, I started looking for a new web host for the steam4me site (the site was over 6G in size and in its hey-day would create bandwidth of 500-800G per month). I've now secured a domain name and secure and generous bandwidth hosting with an Australian company, Ventra IP. The site returns today, albeit somewhat "emaciated" to start with. I've been experimenting with a new layout using CSS for some time and these "adventurous times" have made me accelerate its implementation.

Wayne Campbell, who avid MSTS fans will know as the creator of the super-detailed London and Port Stanley route has commenced work on an MSTS-compatible open source train simulator called Open Rails. Whilst still in alpha release, it's a credit to Wayne and his team that routes and rolling stock are already working in this new simulation. Exciting news indeed as we witness the gradual wind-down in availability of MSTS disks. Click on the link above to have a look or download the working alpha release.
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The latest version of Zonealarm is flagging Clickteam installers as containing malicious code. I picked this up when downloading a Clickteam installer from another site on the web. I then tested my own installers and found that ZA was also flagging my installers as dangerous.

This happens from time to time from all major anti-virus vendors as their scanning systems detect some similarity in code and overstate the risk. It appears that the screening process is picking up some code within these installers that is also used by malaware.

Even Zonealarm gives a subsequent "clean bill of health" to these files that it initially flags as dangerous. Each installer is always tested before release and is clean. Be assured - it is safe to download and install steam4me installers on your systems.

Subsequent updates of the anti-virus updates corrected their error.
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Many of you will have noted the temporary absence of the steam4me site for a few days covering last weekend. The magic men at Interactive Omnimedia and Railpage moved the steam4me site onto its own newer, larger, faster server. As always, these things took longer than expected, but suffice to say, the site is up and running again, faster than ever - a user from the UK confirms that's it's now "faster than a bullet train." (Who am I to argue with such lovely hype {grin!}). Certainly I notice that when I log into the site by FTP, a former delay of 10-20 seconds has been slashed to 1-2 seconds.

I must again acknowledge the extraordinary ongoing generosity of Brian Evans, owner of Omni Interactive and Railpage, and his dedicated support/network team for their support of the Australian and global MSTS community. The site is over 6Gig in size now and the bandwidth it consumes on a monthly basis is seriously scary. There is no way the site could be hosted in its current form and size anywhere else in the world without banner, column or pop-up advertisements, or referral links for downloads to file-sharing sites incorporating "Skimlinks"-type "affiliate marketing revenue" traps. We should appreciate how lucky we MSTS users are in Australia to have such an open, accessible and advert-free site.

In other news, Mike Simpson's is continuing to upgrade Route Riter - it's now at v7.1.47. It includes a new version of TsUtils. "Read more" for upgrade information.

There's also a couple of new routes coming up soon, along with some rolling stock that should test your driving skills. "Read more" for information. `
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Mike's added a fix for the Centre of Gravity issue documented by LW Shaw and Jeff Kraus-Yao: this fix is documented here as part of the "accurate lengths" tutorial.
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