21st July 2025 marks 5 years since West of England mainline was started.
On 21st July 2020 Joe laid the first scenery at Lower Abbey Farm, just South of Axminster:
Working diligently, Joe continued progress for two days, making a start on Axminster station and laying more track. On the 23rd July he started the first asset for the route – Axminster signal box:
By the 26th July, I (Harry) had started route building, fleshing out Joe's work so far and developing my route building technique, as it was my first time attempting the route editor:
It was more than 14 months of work – during which time several more people joined the team – until Phase 1 of the route released on 9th November 2021. This was followed by the Seaton Branch on 23rd April 2022, then finally Phase 2 on 23rd December 2023. Since then, my work has focused on other projects, but I'd like to celebrate 18,450 downloads over all releases of the route. I'm very proud of what we have achieved and I hope one day to extend it even further.
Golden Age Developments, of course, has grown to be much larger than just the West of England mainline. Flagship projects like Dorset Coast and the upcoming Somerset and Dorset cannot be ignored, but nor can our numerous scenario packs, reskins, and patches. Our output consists of 211 website uploads with over 213,000 downloads from over 30,000 unique IP addresses. 14 team members, 134 donators, well over 1500 discord members, and 1700 facebook followers are proof that the Steam era scene is still very much alive in Train Simulator. We have many more projects in progress and planning, which I will be excited to share in the future.
