To a blues pianist like myself, railroads mean one thing: Boogie Woogie, and with that the romance of the engine chugging across the twilit landscape, a moving island of warmth in the midst of nature at its wildest, or industry at its bleakest.
So, its no surprise that I found myself fascinated by the DRail model railway layout software.
Model railway enthusiasts not only understand the romance of rail, they seek to recreate it in their attics or back bedrooms. It’s not a cheap hobby – all that well-engineered track and rolling stock costs money. It’s also a little complicated, since you’ve got to persuade the whole lot to fit together.
You could just buy track and tinker, or plan it all on paper. However, it’s easier – and potentially cheaper, to get yourself a software package to enable you to do your trial-and-error on-screen, and on the cheap.
I dread to think what David had to go through to build DRail. Functionality aside, it has a library of accurately modelled track for all major manufacturers – something of an achievement in itself.
David – as you might guess from his URL - is Dutch. He wanted to make sure that his English website read well to native speakers, so he gave me a shout and I did my thing. I was overjoyed when he mailed me to say:
“…since I put up the website that you edited, I doubled my conversions for the English/American market.”
He then threw his draft documentation my way. I gave it a Full Edit, and he liked the result:
“I’m very happy with your work. I think it gives the product as a whole a quality boost!”
So, post title aside, neither of us has the blues about this project…
[...] version of AnyRail is about to hit the tracks and somebody needed to check changes to the manual. I wrote the original manual, way back when it was DRail, and David was happy to come back to me for the [...]