I would like to ask Richard Garber how many copies of his Railworks route packages he has sold. My goal is to get an idea of the number of how many Railworks supporters are out there at this point?

I honestly don't know off-hand Harry, but that's information I would never give out anyway. To answer your question though, RS.com and most of us are pretty happy with the numbers.

Rich

Thanks Rich. I didn't mean to pry into your business, I was hopeful about the growth in support for RW. I am hopeful that more like myself will choose to move over to RW from MSTS so this venue can grow as MSTS did. BTW, do you have any plans for a book on scenario creation or route building? Both would be well received by this community.

Do you make stuff Harry>?

That's nice of you to say Harry but again, and honestly, Railworks is doing very well. Now it may not appear to be that way on MSTS heavy forums but Railworks America has grown quite a bit but even more so, RS.com is expanding in personnel again and my own company has been done well for the two years I've been doing RS/Railworks. As for the tutorials, I don't think they would be of much help to the MSTS community. I was pretty excited very early in my RS days as I learned, built, did scenarios and released a payware route in about 30 days. The irony in that was that a couple of months before, I had written to one of the execs of RSDL that I thought it would be insanity to think I could learn RS and finish a route in the first year when I thought I might be able to squeeze in two smaller MSTS routes instead. 30 days, Harry. Mostly, I taught myself. I think if there's anything hurting someone within the online community looking at Railworks is the abundance of misinformation that's prevalent in the MSTS based forums about Railworks. Just this week I was amazed to find a thread where enough people were telling others that you couldn't do AI in Railworks scenarios - which was funny to me because I released a scenario expansion package for my Fort Kent route over a month ago that uses plenty of AI. By coincidence I had already started a video about the very same thing and released it - which it is on my Fort Kent page. It's a promo for the expansion scenario package.

I've seen people give all kinds of reasons for not wanting to do Railworks - like notched throttles to no directional headlight. And while the notched throttles is fixed the headlight issue isn't. But you know what? Compared to what Railworks can do, that MSTS can't do, there's no comparison. So I may have lost a few features but they to me are nothing compared to what Railworks can do. Just as importantly, where the last chapter on MSTS was finished a long time ago, it's not for Railworks. Just speaking with RS.com this past week at least two significant upgrades will be coming to the game this summer. The complete history for Railworks is still being written and while I agree with the many it's not happening fast enough, at least its still being worked on.

And as for development and business, better than ever. And I give God the credit for all of that let me tell you. All Aboard basically had a going out of business sign on the door just as most of the other payware vendors that used to reside here in what we used to think of as 'the mall.' I closed my forum not too terribly long ago because I felt the vendors around me that hardly had anything to post was reflecting bad on my business. Distribution is how things are done now and it has been doing all the legwork for me so I don't need a forum anyway. And though I hate to pay out the royalties, I do better. Things are done differently than the MSTS days, but so far it's been pretty good.

While I have fond memories of MSTS and the gang of people I used to talk to, I am happy to have moved on. As far as I'm concerned, the Railworks growth is so good that it doesn't need an injection of personnel from the MSTS community. Each should do as they please. The Railworks community has a different pulse to it than what the MSTS community has. I can't really look at the aging MSTS shots and see them like I used to. The Railworks pictures are so good that at times they will fool me into thinking someone slipped in a real photo. While graphics isn't a big issue for some, it helps me to bring about an immersive environment which doesn't require as much imagination. For me, this has always been about railroading not what game I use. And with the ease I can work in Railworks, I'm not looking with any hopeful aspirations towards MSTS at all. What others decide to do is their business.

Rich