I'm trying to gauge whether the Rail Works community would be interested in belonging to a "virtual railroad".

I've run a "VR" for Microsoft Train Simulator since 2003. A Virtual Railroad, a group or "club" of people who enjoy train simming. We chat and share files, provide training, and we run activities on the sim and report them to the VR. The VR tracks our hours on the roster as we move up through the ranks.

Some of the areas members get involved is in writing new activities, upgrading equipment, reskinning equipment, training programs, and just providing a lot of technical help to new members in the forum. We even have a couple of routes in the works.

We started out with a few fictional short line routes, and those are still the most popular. Recently we started expanding into prototype railroads, moving the prototype routes we "connected to" into new mini-VR's (Norfolk Southern, CSX). And now looking to the west. Although the routes are grouped by their modern prototype, any era is welcomed. For example, I have several Erie and Erie Lackawanna activities written on it's routes, steam and diesel era. I even skinned a D9-40cw to see what she would look like today if... Steam is popular, early diesel. We have two Andre Ming routes from the turn of the century. We do traction, narrow gauge, logging.

So what if you're just interested in running trains? A VR tracks your hours and you get promotions, like the age old Virtual Airline model. We have over 1000 activities for MSTS on file, most are exclusive to our members (we also allow good included acts like Rich Garber's, after all, he wrote the book...). We have a growing training program that starts you out with "which button goes forward" all the way up to prototypical rules and slack action. It was put together with the help of real world steam and diesel engineers. As the RW training programs would be. We have a lot of people who know the sim inside and out, willing to help with problems. You can be assigned your activities, start where you left off, or simply run whatever train and route you're in the mood for.

And we're always looking for new ideas to make it more fun, and more prototypical.

Stop by and see what we've built for MSTS. If we did the same for Rail Works, would you join? Would you be willing to help others in the forum or help setting up training programs? Would you possibly be interested in managing a mini_VR one day of your favorite fictional or prototype routes? The infrastructure is there (including our own domain name coming soon!!!) it can be set up very easily.

Leave your comments. I really like running Rail Works and want to learn more about it.