Melbourne

Just got curious and looked up an old train site I really liked - https://steam4me.net/. Unfortunately, it seems it's been taken down. The man who ran the site - Yuri Sos passed away last year. He'd organised for his family to keep the site running through donations until 2030 (with the site fully funded to 2026 as of 2021). Unfortunately, it seems something fell through and it didn't work out. It was shut down in March, apparently.

I was quite sad to hear of his passing, he had a large section of his website devoted to an old train sim from the early 2000s (Microsoft Train Simulator) which was run entirely out of passion, pretty much. AFAIK, it was also the largest host of Australian MSTS content still up. And even though it hasn't changed very much since the pre 2010s, and most other comparable websites that still exist have download limits, popup ads, and bandwith limitations, it didn't have any of that. It was, to quote the website, "where "stuff" just works, first time every time".

I downloaded a ton of assets and packs from there in 2021/22 because I was afraid it might suddenly vanish and be lost to time, like most other niche sites from the 90s, but it just kept running and running, and I was also worried it might overwhelm their servers. I actually looked it up today, because I wanted to try and crawl it and slowly log all of its links into a spreadsheet, then make sure everything was archived onto the Wayback Machine. Thankfully, it does seem that everything has been archived onto WM (although it'll obviously be subject to the wayback machine's lovely 40kbs-ish download speeds

RIP Yuri