I started this route in earnest in January 2004 shortly after I got TRS2004. I had a plan to build my then active model railroad as a full-sized route. Little did I know that the route would be around nearly two decades later. Over the years, the route grew, shrank, changed shape a bit, but always stayed true to the theme I set out as an industrial city sending its goods to a port city located some distance away. The original rail line eventually became part of a larger system and the line soldiered on until Guilford bought them in the early 1980s. After splitting from Guilford, the line recovered and the company became a designated operator of a larger system as the story goes.
Over the ensuing years, my route building skills improved, the plans became more firmed up, and mergers occurred. The route stayed more or less in its original form until TRS2006 when I decided it was time for a change. The port city changed and I never made it to the mill city located some distance away. There were other mill cities, a mountain division, more coastal running, a big fancy schmancy town or two, but not "the mill city". For some reason that Holy Grail never appeared.
In 2010 I had a major PC crash and nearly lost everything including backups. The route and my Trainz content miraculously survived the ordeal but barely. The route suffered some major corruption and I lost a good portion of it which needed to be rebuilt from scratch. Using some magic tricks and a few prayers, I was able to salvage at least the bigger part of the route, but lost the seaport area and some other parts I had worked on. I eventually recovered the parts from some older backups since the crash occurred just before I could backup my current version. A bit of merging, and the route continued to run right through TS12, T:ANE, and TRS2019.
Today, I archived the route and put it away. Why? It's actually falling apart under its weight. There are too many things wrong with it due to the intervening time. There are also things that I want to do differently, replace parts with others, and perhaps redo the mainline, again. I also made an awful mistake which I can't recover from very gracefully. I was thinning a forest down some and deleted some trees. I then decided to replace others, but left the delete button enabled. I didn't notice this in the section I was in immediately because there are not a lot of trees there to begin with. Traveling, however, to the mountainous parts, however, showed bare hills. Yes, what was supposed to be thick forests was empty. Baseboard after baseboard of empty barren landscape. I blighted my forest as if a great forest fire wiped out the area.
After recovering from the shock, I found other things that went unnoticed. Over the years, the route suffered various ills and events as noted, and apparently due to its size I never noticed sunken baseboards. Yeah those things. This wouldn't have been so bad if it was the freeform parts, but this occurred in sections I merged in from DEM sources. Recreating those again is difficult. I did patch one area from a backup, but that was truly painful and required deleting the rest of the route to capture a single baseboard.
One piece was bad enough, but upon looking further around the route, I found more and more holes and it was at that time I decided to retire this nearly lifelong project.
I mean lifelong. A 16-year project saw deaths in my family, births, various pets come and go, and eventually my retirement. One cat in particular enjoyed the Auran aliens and would come running when I started up TRS2004 when she heard the music. Lili passed away in 2020 at 17 years. I didn't run the built in routes then and rarely do now and I worked on my route instead. Traveling back and forth to work had me thinking about changes and additions I could make when I got home. I would them implement them and continue growing the route a few baseboards at a time over the ensuing years. When I lost my sister in 2017, I escaped by Trainzing. When my mom passed in 2018, the first thing I did was open up my route and build as if to sneak away into my own world while the chaos around me was growing. The route now has joined them and will remain in my memories as I create a new one. The old Phoenix here can't be risen from the ashes any longer.
Over the ensuing years, my route building skills improved, the plans became more firmed up, and mergers occurred. The route stayed more or less in its original form until TRS2006 when I decided it was time for a change. The port city changed and I never made it to the mill city located some distance away. There were other mill cities, a mountain division, more coastal running, a big fancy schmancy town or two, but not "the mill city". For some reason that Holy Grail never appeared.
In 2010 I had a major PC crash and nearly lost everything including backups. The route and my Trainz content miraculously survived the ordeal but barely. The route suffered some major corruption and I lost a good portion of it which needed to be rebuilt from scratch. Using some magic tricks and a few prayers, I was able to salvage at least the bigger part of the route, but lost the seaport area and some other parts I had worked on. I eventually recovered the parts from some older backups since the crash occurred just before I could backup my current version. A bit of merging, and the route continued to run right through TS12, T:ANE, and TRS2019.
Today, I archived the route and put it away. Why? It's actually falling apart under its weight. There are too many things wrong with it due to the intervening time. There are also things that I want to do differently, replace parts with others, and perhaps redo the mainline, again. I also made an awful mistake which I can't recover from very gracefully. I was thinning a forest down some and deleted some trees. I then decided to replace others, but left the delete button enabled. I didn't notice this in the section I was in immediately because there are not a lot of trees there to begin with. Traveling, however, to the mountainous parts, however, showed bare hills. Yes, what was supposed to be thick forests was empty. Baseboard after baseboard of empty barren landscape. I blighted my forest as if a great forest fire wiped out the area.
After recovering from the shock, I found other things that went unnoticed. Over the years, the route suffered various ills and events as noted, and apparently due to its size I never noticed sunken baseboards. Yeah those things. This wouldn't have been so bad if it was the freeform parts, but this occurred in sections I merged in from DEM sources. Recreating those again is difficult. I did patch one area from a backup, but that was truly painful and required deleting the rest of the route to capture a single baseboard.
One piece was bad enough, but upon looking further around the route, I found more and more holes and it was at that time I decided to retire this nearly lifelong project.
I mean lifelong. A 16-year project saw deaths in my family, births, various pets come and go, and eventually my retirement. One cat in particular enjoyed the Auran aliens and would come running when I started up TRS2004 when she heard the music. Lili passed away in 2020 at 17 years. I didn't run the built in routes then and rarely do now and I worked on my route instead. Traveling back and forth to work had me thinking about changes and additions I could make when I got home. I would them implement them and continue growing the route a few baseboards at a time over the ensuing years. When I lost my sister in 2017, I escaped by Trainzing. When my mom passed in 2018, the first thing I did was open up my route and build as if to sneak away into my own world while the chaos around me was growing. The route now has joined them and will remain in my memories as I create a new one. The old Phoenix here can't be risen from the ashes any longer.
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