Post-Winter Plans

It has certainly been a while, hasn't it?
 
Things here aren't dead, many things are being worked on - let's go through a few of them.

Some of the many mountains that wrap around the railroad tracks on the electrified mainline.

The biggest project is still the electric route that has actually finally been going on for over a year - I guess we're a little late on that one. Regardless, much work has been put into a few new locations for the route, with some reworking of older areas.
 
The new things on the route include yet more bridges (at least one bigger than the bridge seen in many screenshots), more incredibly massive mountains, and a large railyard at the end of the whole thing. Too early to post screenshots of most of these things, but there are some shots on my Flickr page - located in the 'about' tab - as well as on both main forums.
 
Another ongoing project has been the reconstruction of two other routes - both of them Silver Lines - but at very reduced rates compared to the electric route, which by itself has been pretty slow. The current hope is to finish at least one of these 3 major routes by some time this year, but we'll see how that goes.
 
A few other notes; some new modules & model railroad-style routes are also in the works, with plans for many more of both of the former and two more confirmed major routes which have had basic starts and another one in planning stages. As well, a new Milwaukee Road project is in the works now to build parts of the Milwaukee Road's electrified lines. Some good news is that a fellow Erecting Hall member (petrama25) has made a sort of 'beta' version of his EF4 Little Joe locomotive in Milwaukee Road colors, and gave me the locomotive and a psd for it.
Long story short, I gave it a quick skin.

SLRR ex-MILW EF4 E76 heads an empty coal train with an SD40-2 and F7B unit in late August of 1989.

...it does include rusty/weathered skins, too. Not yet for release, but some day in the future when the route is ready for release and when a 'final' version of the EF4 is available, it just might happen. Another thing to note is the F7B with black grilles - this is the real 'Freight' scheme, despite what the downloads page claimed. This and the F7A will be done up in the freight scheme and put out sometime in the near future, with a few other little odds and ends.
 
If things go smoothly, some of this stuff might get done relatively soon, and I use soon loosely. Lately, I've been plagued with hardware problems - everything from headphones to hard drive to graphics card - which has slowed things down significantly.
 
Last note is that even a year after Trainz: A New Era (TANE) has been released, it's still too bug-riddled and a disaster to be worth supporting. Poor performance regardless of what settings are inputted and the mess of the content manager have also caused more issues than it's worth to deal with the game.
 
That's all for now.
 
Cheers,
SM