This programming note... I am in the process of moving my website to a new hosting service. If you get any errors trying to get to irwinsjournal.com or sending e-mail to any address in that domain, please try again... I have all the pages reloaded at the "new place" for the UMTRR, Atlas First Generation (including Doug Gosha's pages on A1G locos and Lone Star OOO), the Irwin's Journal Online collection of stories, and the "other stuff," but still working on timing including transfer of the e-mail accounts and figuring out the best time to "hit the button". If I don't do it right I'll wind up crossing the streams and the Sta-Puft Marshallow Man will appear, so I'd better be careful!
Ooohhhhh, did someone say marshmallows!!!! Good luck with that George. Hopefully it will alleviate some or all of the headaches the current provider has caused you.
Well, I hit the button on the website tonight... and (hopefully) reconfigured all the e-mails. Will be very happy to get this High Level Stress over with. It will be 24 to 48 hours before I have working e-mail again in my domain. It was a lot easier when we had to send snail mail or pick up a landline to communicate with people. By the way, I did send out the January 2024 UMTRR out before I hit the button, so it should be in subscriber inboxes by now.
I received it! Thank you for all you do with this. It is appreciated! Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
I particularly enjoy your (with @Doug Gosha's) A1G pages featuring early N Scale. I happened to read that you identified Atlas' 2403 Jersey Central 40 Foot Steel Gondola as a sentimental favorite. Me too! I bought mine as a kid in the early 1970s as a summer vacation souvenir at a small hobby shop within Flemington, NJ's Turntable Junction shopping area. I love it as much today as I did some 50 years ago and still run it.
I have one of those, too, on the layout, now. BTW, while I was in Philly visiting my daughter, we crossed over into NJ and went to the Yankee Dabbler from whom I bought some MT couplers by mail order, a few years ago. A bit of an old fashioned hobby shop, not organized very well and not a lot of N scale (except track-they had quite a bit of that) but I did buy an MT Nickle Plate boxcar for a souvenir. Doug
Update: You may have noticed my absence this week... or perhaps celebrated it I think we're all good to go now. After transferring all my e-mail boxes over to the new host, they sent a notice requiring configuration changes that align with the Google/Yahoo/AOL requirements to send e-mail to those domains beginning February 1. And so it was back to the start again... along with some time on chat with Technical Support to get it all together. Last task is to officially fire the previous web host. I left some overlap time just in case.
One last update... I did "fire" my previous web host. The representative... an actual human, amazingly... tried to ply me with questions of why I was leaving after 20 years, would I consider a better deal, you know this is going to take you 3 to 6 months to do correctly, etc. etc. and I cut him off saying that I was already done and that since I was taking time off from work to do this he just needed to do what I asked... I'm now almost done with the 2023 updates to the UMTRR Website. I think I have the Month By Month page done all the way and working correctly through the December releases; I know that the 2023 Release Table and the Runner Pack and Weathered Pack pages are done. Just a little more work and I can start on 2024... only seven weeks late! The February 2024 UMTRR writing is well underway. If you haven't heard or read elsewhere, MTL announced pre-orders for three HO Scale "Grit and Grime" Center Flows-- their paint, lettering, and weathering on Accurail cars. Alas, I had to drop the UKDRR a number of years ago... only so much time available... although I suppose it's tempting now that Kadee is down to one HO freight car release per month. It is a bit apples and oranges since Kadee and Micro-Trains Line are very separate companies now.
