Railworks America

Clear Tracks site is down or deleted. Their Facebook is gone. They left faster than expected.

Please just please.

TFOLRailfan wrote:Clear Tracks site is down or deleted. Their Facebook is gone. They left faster than expected.

So be it!

I have seen lots of good content creators go out in RWA since I have been here.
We´ll miss them. Cemeteries are full of indispensable people and great creators.

They sure will be missed. They were my favorite reskiners ever since I found them out.

My favorite repainters are all here in RWA.

I've been around the TrainSim community since its beginnings. Content creators have come and gone, come back and are gone once again. None can be labeled as indispensable. Not saying they aren't or won't be missed but as the saying goes, "When one door closes another opens." Someone always steps up and fills in the void.

The faces in this community are in constant change, people come and go for various reasons. What I do know is that when people are burnt out they will use any excuse to walk, especially if they have reached the point where they think they are not appreciated. Until the events of the last couple of days, I had never heard of Clear Tracks. I was lucky enough to get on to his site before he took it down. I wasn't quick enough though to download any of his work. I was really surprised when I woke up the next morning and my world hadn't ended. Last I checked neither had anyone else's on here.

My point is this, the guy was going to leave, why he decided to finish up whatever project it was that got canceled, is not of consequence. What is, points to what I believe was his actual lack of desire to finish the project. As such, he took a perceived insult and lack of appreciation to move on in his personal life, an action that he should have taken in the first place. The drama that was constructed by a few individuals, while sad, I found entertaining.

A lot of effort is put into this forum by three individuals that get very little if any appreciation from the rest of the members. This forum is tame compared to several others and if you think people are rude and offensive here, I can point you at a few that would cause the hair on the back of your neck to stand up. When I saw this post I like to fell over. People give it a rest, life didn't end, the sun continues to rise in the morning and set in the evening, and the folks that run this forum are still here, alive and I pray well and so will they be for a long time.

To Bob, Buzz, and Chacal and the many content creators that privilege us with their work...Thank You!

Amen.

Expanding upon what jgvaughan said, "Train People" can be some of the most knowledgable and helpful folks you will ever encounter. They can also be some of the most pompous, demanding, entitled turds you will ever have the displeasure of encountering. Burnout is hard to avoid when every tiny detail is a scrutinized, and every percieved defect or deficiency is trumpeted to the far side of the moon and back by some folks who lack the talent to pump gas without reading the instructions each time. Creating content for railroad sims, as well as building real world model trains, really does mean that you will live your life under a microscope.

However, some creators who really don't give two rips about public opinion, will persist a little longer in their efforts, only to succumb after a time to Life itself. Content creation takes a LOT of time and effort. During my time I travelled thousands of miles, spent as many dollars, and took even more photos, videos, and audio recordings. There were days when I spent eight hours a day, in addition to my regular job, behind a computer screen, creating this bolt or painting that nut. I even took a laptop to my job and worked on train-sim projects while on my work-breaks - I'm non-union; it's a bloody miracle I wasn't fired! And ultimately, my family suffered for my hobby-turned-business. The money bought some understanding, but the time I could have been spending with them, it really wasn't fair to be taking that from them for works that would be forgotten as soon as I left the building.

The day ultimately came when I was in the middle of a new project, and I found myself staring like a blanked drooling idiot at the computer screen. There was plenty more work to be done, and I had every resource to do it with, but I just could not make that cursor do one more thing. I had to let it go.

Let me just be clear about this: I would not trade the ten or so years I spent creating railroad sim content for anything else in the world. It is one more notch in my life experiences, and at my wake I'll be sure to include a few pictures of it in the memorial video. But life moves on, people change, they find new things to experience. My current gig is riding bicycles thousands of miles and hundreds of thousands of feet vertically every year. However, when I can find the time, some of my favorite bike routes take me alongside the tracks. Who knows, maybe someday when I'm old and the legs don't work so good anymore, I might just dust of my camera, and my computer...

Good luck to Clear Tracks, wherever and whatever they are doing.