About the Train-Sim.Com Archive

Train-Sim.Com went online on March 28, 2001. Founded by Nels Anderson, it set out to be a central meeting place for the train-sim community and a "club house" for people who build and drive virtual railways. It grew around Microsoft Train Simulator, which arrived the same year, and added message forums, a downloadable file library, an extensive FAQ, tutorials, reviews and a steady news feed.

What the site contained

• Message forums: boards for general discussion, MSTS, locomotive and route design, activities, skinning, cabs, sound, screenshots, BVE, Trainz, Train Simulator 2, multiplayer and more, run on DCForum.
• The MSTS FAQ: answers to the questions everyone asked, from activities and customization to steam operations and technical problems.
• How To guides, reviews and news covering add-on releases and the wider sim world.
• The file library: listings of routes, rolling stock and activities.
• The site also hosted the Boston Area MG Club pages.

How this archive was restored

The original site eventually went offline. Its pages survived only as captures in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. This restoration rebuilds them from those captures:

• Every page keeps its original address, so old links and bookmarks work again. Old dynamic forum links redirect to the matching thread or forum.
• Original titles, descriptions, authors and dates are preserved. Each page notes when it was captured.
• Pages were reformatted for modern screens. Posts, headings and lists were rebuilt from the original markup, and site navigation that no longer works was removed.
• Images are served from the archive where a copy survived. Some forum attachments were never captured and could not be recovered.
• Pages added to the domain after the original site closed, such as spam, are permanently removed.

New material, such as the guides, is marked with its own date so it is never confused with the original content.

Credits and corrections

Original content © 2001–2009 Nels Anderson and the respective authors and forum members. If you wrote something preserved here and would like it corrected, credited differently or removed, please get in touch.