Time seems to just pass by so quickly and it’s hard to believe it has been over a month since our last channel update.

Although we don’t want these updates to just showcase the litany of issues that we’ve been dealing with, it is relevant to the channel, so here goes…

We haven’t been posting as many new videos because we lost one of our editing computers. That has put a serious damper on video releases. As you may recall, our last update talked about some file corruption issues we were having – but that was on our MAIN computer, not the secondary one which can no longer edit video. This has resulted in us reevaluating our work flow and technical set up. We currently have a new computer on order and we are also making improvements to our LAN including a switch upgrade and installing a NAS (Network Attached Storage) unit. This should really improve our work flow since we were using flash drives and external hard drives to swap files back and forth between computers – which was really time consuming. (We’re not sure if you all are interested in this – so let us know if you want more details than what we are providing here. Plus, we want to make sure everything works as planned before talking about it in detail, so fingers crossed!)

We still have a few completed compilation videos that have yet to be posted, and now the priority is to get out some content while we wait for the new computer and other items to get here. So, yes – we currently have a huge slowdown on video releases right now, but we will get more content released when we are back to full capacity on editing.

In other channel news – we were able to successfully launch our very own Train Bot on the channel. It is dreadfully clunky and limited at the moment, but our plan is to improve that over time. We obviously can’t be on 24/7 and so having Train Bot answer some basic questions/give information/send welcome messages when we’re not around may be useful? Or just annoying? You tell us!  And the other thing we’ve been working on is running OBS in order to have more dynamic information on the stream. We did some very initial testing of this (with all negative results, of course), but with some technical assistance, we’re pretty sure we’ve cracked it. Unfortunately, we were getting ready to run some more serious tests of this when the whole computer debacle happened – so the OBS implementation is currently on hold until we get all of the hardware issues sorted out.

On a personal note, we attended the 55th Mid-Ohio Insulator Show in Springfield, Ohio this month. We didn’t shoot any video, but had a great time connecting with folks and showing off one of the rare insulators in our collection. If anyone is interested in us producing insulator content, let us know. Growing up next to the tracks was the beginning of this lifelong collecting journey as well. Do you collect anything related to trains? If so, share that in the comments!

Because we knew we were heading to the show, we created a test promo t-shirt. We are still working to find a local printing partner to make some shirts for the channel. Once we get that up and running, we will let you know about that as well. We had hoped to have some stuff before the holidays, but the computer debacle has put nearly everything on hold. (This seems to be a big part of our story – big plans, some sort of technical trainwreck, reprioritize, repeat…ah life!)

So that’s pretty much where we are at the moment. We have quite a bit of trackside footage waiting to be edited, as well as tons and tons of compilation backlog to tackle. As always, we appreciate your patience and support as we continue on this YouTube journey.

P.S. Next week, we will be giving away yet another 10 FREE channel memberships for Thanksgiving. You do not have to be online to win one!