I can't believe it's been six years since I updated the site. The lack of computers with nVidia graphics cards over the past few years have hobbled my use of MSTS. A recent acquisition of multiple myeloma has meant that I've not the stamina to work full-time any more and the Covid-19 "stay-at-home" requirements (not that I'm complaining, Australia is Covid-19 infection-free and death-free) means that I've got time to revisit MSTS. Serendipity also as I acquired an old HP DEskpro SFF G2: I purchased an MSI nVidia graphics card, performed a clean install of MSTS and am slowly relearning all my skills that reside somewhere in the back of my brain.

I documented my install and updated the installation tutorial for some windows 10 changes: I was pleasantly surprised at how smoothly the install went.

I also need to recognise again the ongoing generous donations by many members of the MSTS community: I've sometimes/often been slack in acknowledging individual donations but I'm truly grateful for the ongoing support. Thanks to this generosity, the steam4me site is fully funded till late 2025. In the event of my "inability" to update the web hosting, my son will continue to update the site account till 2030.

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Previously missing, I have found the infrastructure section of the steam4me site on an old hard drive and have uploaded it here. It's mostly still in the format of 10 years ago, but I think all the linked files will work. Links with thumbnail images will connect to pages that have been updated to the latest steam4me format.

By the way, ongoing generous donations by many members of the MSTS community (heartfelt thanks, people!), the steam4me site is fully funded till late 2019.

As some may be aware, most of the larger MSTS route files were hosted on a file-hosting service at hotfile.com. The main reason for doing this was to avoid excess load on steam4me's server at VentraIP.

As a result of a US Federal Court ruling, Hotfile.com was ordered to pay $80 million in damages because of copyright abuses. Hotfile elected to shut down its site completely rather than employ a filtering mechanism, taking everyone's files with it. This is probably a salutory lesson to those who believe that cloud hosting services are the way of the future.

I've elected to bring all files "back home" to the steam4me site; you should be able to find everything you need here.

When downloading routes, please DO NOT use download managers that permit multiple segmented downloads as these place an unacceptable (to VentraIP) load on their shared servers and may result in suspension of hosting for the steam4me site.

By the way, as a result of generous donations by many members of the MSTS community (heartfelt thanks, people!), the steam4me site is fully funded till late 2017.

Brian Bere-Streeter's "Short West+Short South" route is now available from the Routes page. 247 miles of mainline trackage ranging from inner city suburban running to gruelling mountain grades to fast undulating rural mainline trackage. Beautifully detailed, it's a significant addition to Australian MSTS.

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Well, the visitor counter has just clicked over the THREE MILLION mark - amazing! And it's almost exactly 10 years to the day since MSTS appeared in Australia and is still going strong! Thanks to all those model and route builders who've created so much wonderful content for all of us to enjoy as well as those ciontributors who've made significant discoveries in MSTS and have taken the time and trouble to share them with the wider MSTS community. Finally thanks to all those of you from all over the world who have sent donations to help keep this site alive - I'm humbled and your contributions are sincerely appreciated.

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Brian Bere-Streeter's "North Sydney Tramlines" route is now available from the Routes page. Since its earlier release elsewhere, the route and its installer have been upgraded to make it more compact. The other Sydney trams, R1, O and Ballast trams will be re-released shortly with expanded road numbers.

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The NSWGR&T R class tram is once again available from the "Electric Traction" section. It was previously withdrawn because of shape file issues resulting in its inability to run under MSTS-Bin. Paul Gausden ("shape file guru") identified a correctible error in the shape and I've now repaired the shape file. In addition, Brian Bere-Streeter has added another nine road numbers and destinations.

In the tutorials section, I've added a page to assist with the infamous "Activity Editor "Loses" AI/Static Consists" error: it involves deleting keys within the registry, but the methodology is different from XP to Windows 7 (of course!). Browse to the MSTS errors page for more information.

The tutorial on adding nodes to cross-overs has been updated; the recommendation now is that you use "Deer Hazards" rather than "Speedposts" when setting up the elements for creating these nodes. Browse to Creating a Diamond Crossover complete with Track Node for more information.

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The complete catalogue of James Brook's models has now been uploaded to this site. Whilst most models have been here for some time, the download pages for the GY, RY and I wagons had not been completed.

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The Western Australia BHP Billiton Iron Ore line and rolling stock have been the consuming work of Marek Lemow for some years, but we can finally see the fruits of his labours with the release of the route and rolling stock, both locomotives and ore wagons.

Click on the links for more information.

In other news, James Brook's GM class locomotives have been returned to the site and can be found in the diesel section.

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It is with extreme sadness that I must report that Allan Lownsborough passed away this morning Wednesday after suffering a major heart attack on Monday. Allan and I spoke usually once/twice weekly and I'm proud to have counted him as one of my very close friends.

Matt Austin writes

"Allan was many things to many people. To some here, Allan was a creator of outstanding SAR routes and models. To those of us who were privileged to know him beyond the forum, he was a friend, a wise man and a deep thinker. We spoke about many, many things, far beyond MSTS. His experience, knowledge, wisdom and humour was broad, and his patience in suffering was an example.

"For those who didn't know, Allan had suffered from various ailments for some years, and he bore the difficulties that came with debilitating medical issues with patience and good humour. He didn't let these issues stop him, and he was active with his interests until his passing. He was never sorry for himself, and he extended the hand of friendship and guidance to us all.

"Allan, it is a privilege to call you a friend. May you rest in peace."

Condolences and best wishes to the family have flowed in from members of the MSTS community from all over the world.

Addendum

A Memorial service for Allan was held on Wednesday 17 November 2010 at Modbury Church of Christ, Modbury, SA (followed by private cremation). The church was packed to overflowing with friends who held him in high esteem for his warmth, patience, wise counsel and good humour.

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.

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A note for users of Internet Explorer v8:

Some pages may not display correctly (missing JPGS, large gaps in text, extra lines, etc.).
Click on Tools and select Compatibility View.

This should ensure that the pages display as intended (IE8 will remember this setting).
Fortunately, users of Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari will have no such display issues.

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 available 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 available 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.

"As a result the Railpage servers have been switched off. All data is intact to the very best of our knowledge, we just don't have physical access to our infrastructure right now. DNS details are currently on Brian's desk at the DR office, so are not accessible to us until he returns.

"We have requested permission to retrieve the servers as soon as possible so that we can move them to alternate hosting arrangements.

"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.