It was 20 years ago today....

[Paulsw2]

Well actually last Wednesday: on 1st October 2005, just after 3.00pm I found myself in the local Woolworths (can't remember why) and stumbled upon a game in the bargain bin. A snip at £9.99 For Trainz Ultimate Collection. The rest, as they say, is history (and 7 iterations of the game later that I've personally bought and installed). It's been a wonderful hobby, some frustrations (often played out on this forum!) but much joy as well. And sometimes a life-saver - back in 2012 when I was at a very low ebb (around the time of my autism diagnosis), I learned how to reskin and completed and uploaded the Ashburton-Windrush route, so it kept me going. I was proud to support the crowd funder for TANE and have been a subscriber for most years out of the last six (I've just rejoined Gold.)

My thanks to the original 'brew crew' and originators of the game and the staff at N3V who've kept it going. Long may you carry on. (Actually, please do otherwise the game will stop working instantly!) Above all my thanks to all the members of this great community (and also thinking of those we've lost along the way), my colleagues at TCWW and the very talented young creators I've had the privilege of working with in the last few years. That kept me going as well!

This is the earliest Trainz screenshot I could find (from March 2006). As you can see, I was still learning how to do trackwork. And at only 7fps, I'd already worked out I was going to need a new PC!

By contrast, here's a few of my latest screenshots: back on Gold and trying out the BR blue pack. I think my trackwork has improved!

It's been a great ride. Here's to the next 20 years!

 

[mick1960]

The Trainz virus caught me one year earlier. I have been making a precise plan for the Potsdamer Bahnhof Berlin in n-gauge, calculated the amount of turnouts and went to Modellbahn Pietsch at Friedrichstrasse to purchase the first lot.
Living seven years in Indonesia I must have lost track of the price development of model railways ... I could have afford maybe 2% of the material I needed -

Totally frustrated I made my way to the shop exit and stumbled over a rack with movies and software and I saw Trainz Raikroad Simulator 2004 which I purchased.

Very enthusiastic I started to build a route.My choice fell on the Woltersdorfer Strassenbahn, about 5km long, so not too unrealistic to make. After a while I realised that the main tram of this route wasn't available.
So I got Gmax and started the Gotha T57, a project I never finished due the lack of a fitting engine.

The 'problem' was that now I was infected by a far worse virus called 'content creation' ...
From now on I used Trainz only a a testing platform for my assets (902 by now).

I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to all the CC-dinosaurs here who helped me with endless patience to overcome the countless pitfalls of content creation!

mick1960!

 

[pware]

I think my trackwork has improved!

Yes, I think that we can all say that. More experience and better track assets (PBR textures, procedural tracks, etc) have had a noticeable effect.

 

[Forester1]

When Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.
(sorry for the OT, the title was too much to resist for a musical type like me)

 

[napierdeltic]

For me it was 4th June 2004 at Railfest, York, UK which was to celebrated the 200th anniversary of the first steam locomotive and being introduced to the Trainz team who had a sales stand there. I was in charge of running the Deltic simulator cab of 55008 with 2 PC's and the Microsoft simulator. The full story is here actually. I certainly dont look like the person in the last photo now!!

Trainz Portal

Explore, Drive and Create with the ultimate train simulator experience for PC, Mac and Mobile. Hundreds of thousands of items available for free on the Download Station.

www.trainzportal.com

Trainz Portal

Explore, Drive and Create with the ultimate train simulator experience for PC, Mac and Mobile. Hundreds of thousands of items available for free on the Download Station.

www.trainzportal.com

Fiona
ECML Project Leader but been myself for 10 years I think.

 

[marmalade32]

Oh to stumble upon a trainz thomas tank remake again (It was from one of the later books). Thank you, old cruddy SI3D models, My transitional era indulgence thanks you.

 

[Thomas_4014]

that. is. just. beautiful. (i've been with this community for about 2 or 3 years and i still make bad routes but i'm working on a route that has 1000+ miles of track for trs2022+ and uploading it to the dls))

 

[JCitron]

I joined on December 28, 2004. I had found a link to www.auran.com back in 2002 on the box for PaintShed for MSTS. Curiosity got the better of me and I followed the URL to the website and forums. Greg Lane was hashing out plans for another puzzle piece and there were lots of posts from many of the longtime, now many long gone, members in the forums.

I tried the demo and it crashed immediately due to my really unstable ATI 9500 LE video card! I checked the forums again after I got an Elsa Gloria video card and the demo worked. I liked Surveyor because I could build things easily unlike MSTS which was very limited and was very unstable to a point of sending out a GPF randomly while using the Activity Editor.

Then I saw that TRS2004 was going to be released soon(tm) and was going to include interactive industries and stations. They missed their Christmas 2004 ship date but shipped shortly afterwards and that's when I picked it up at CompUSA and couldn't wait to install it.

I quickly went through the tutorials and tried modifying a few built-in routes, drove a bunch, and downloaded some from the DLS which I modified because I didn't like floating track and roads. This has been my peeve since the early days and still is today.

After that, I set out on a plan I had been using for a model railroad I attempted multiple times and got it sort of right this time. I set the measurements to Imperial and ended up making the route too tall and too deep with no way to fix it until I got TransDEM Back then, my texturing and track laying was unsurprisingly bad. A few years ago, I imported a portion of the original route into my current iteration of the same theme and did some fixing up. What a difference a lick and promise make to bring something up-to-date. Tracks were relayed, textures redone, camelback hills smoothed, canyons removed, and low and behold it's a different world.

Trainz tech aside, I never thought of Trainz as realistic and more like a gigantic model railroad - the kind you build in your dreams or if you're a billionaire with no worries about spending money on and can buy a football stadium for a train layout.

With that said, like a model railroad, working on a Trainz route is akin to fiddling in the basement or loft on the layout as we fix something here, fiddle around there, add in or replace something there then give a session a drive.

Like a model railroad in my basement, Trainz is also my go-to when things aren't going well. When I lost my job, I spent the afternoon escaping as I worked on a route. Some of my best progress occurs when I do that as I dive in to get away from it all.

Anyway, as I said last weekend to my uncles who visited us during their once a year get together when I show them my current creations, it's addicting. Yes, Trainz is one of those hobbies that has that love-hate Ying-Yang thing to it. When it works, it works well but when it doesn't it's horrible. Last weekend it worked and worked well on my laptop. I didn't have a cringe moment when the AI decides to wander off and get stuck somewhere. It just worked and everyone behaved as if they were warned ahead of time not to play up.