I hit the mother load.

[OldGI]

I've been using Trainz since 2004. I took a decade or so break until I bought TANE. Had to start new because I have no clue what my last ID number was, lost in time.

I found my old copies of Trains a while back. A few days ago I found a CD wallet with ALL of the content I downloaded over the years. When you were on dial up internet, you never delete anything, even if you didn't like it. I'm finding narrow gauge stuff from Ben Neal, Lots, old RRMods, USLW, TPR and the old Virtual Railroader site.

VR Reading room PDF files and routes like Bearpaw Lumber. I loaded up TRS 2009 and have been importing this stuff all day. I still have one more DVD to go. Very few missing dependencies but tons of errors. I have no real reason why, I just want to get it all working.

I just took a hands on trip though Trainz past. It's amazing to see how far its come. That little Bear paw Lumber route made me uninstall MSTS. Speaking of which, there is a DVD or two of MSTS content as well. Save that project for later

 

[G.M.]

Welcome back, same story here i took a 12 year break
after TRS2006 broke all my content I made for the dutch people
Have all those slow collected items and stuff I made still here
btw TRS2004SP2 still runs like a charm here on Win10


You will enjoy TRS19 and TRS22 also, it even looks better, if your PC is up to date

 

[JCitron]

Isn't it great discovering old content like that!

There's nothing wrong with having content backed ups. This has worked out in my favor because websites disappear even if they appear solid and will never go anywhere such as TPR and USLW. There have been many times when I've been able to find dependencies by checking through my carefully indexed content folders on my backup drive.

I also have a collection of CDs I made back in my TRS2004 and TRS2006 days when I was also on slow connections and in among the backups was my complete TRS2004 install. While digging through my disks, a couple of years ago I found a backup of my original route I started in January 2004 and a later backup of my same route modified in TRS2006 as the original route went through some major changes. After copying the data over and updating the route filenames to the new version, I brought in my route TRS2004 version into TRS19 and later on the TRS2006 version.

After updating the files to the new naming convention, I was able to bring both versions into TRS19. While my route buildings were at best laughable in those days, the overall gist of what I planned was there. With the two routes now installed, I trimmed out the parts I wanted and deleted the rest and incorporated those into my current iteration. After a lot more than scraping the wallpaper and painting and more like a complete renovation, I've been able to blend in the old areas quite well. There's still a lot that needs to be done but it was great reincorporating areas of the original route that I really liked but had been removed over the years but had planned to rebuild at one time or another.

Like you, I felt I had hit paydirt and it felt good looking back at the old route as laughable as some of my route building skills were at the time.

 

[DARTrider]

When you were on dial up internet, you never delete anything, even if you didn't like it. I'm finding narrow gauge stuff from Ben Neal, Lots, old RRMods, USLW, TPR and the old Virtual Railroader site.

Even now, I still keep all my stuff. I use a little 320 GB drive to hold copies of the cdp’s in case I lose them or need to find something. Welcome back to Trainz.

 

[OldGI]

I used TRS 2004 like a catalogue. As I moved from version to version, I backed everything I could up into it. Most, if not all of the dependencies I needed were there. You didn't get a hash folder in your local folder, you got a folder with the kid.

It's just fun to dig through the old stuff.

 

[JCitron]

I used TRS 2004 like a catalogue. As I moved from version to version, I backed everything I could up into it. Most, if not all of the dependencies I needed were there. You didn't get a hash folder in your local folder, you got a folder with the kid.

It's just fun to dig through the old stuff.

Yup. The old uncompressed file structure was so easy to find stuff and manipulate outside of Content Manager.

It is fun looking through the old stuff and laughing too at what we thought was the bees' knees back in the old days compared to what we can do today.