January Channel Update

Hi everyone, hope you've all had enjoyable holidays (for those who get them)! Time for a bit of a channel update:

I expect the next major video will be (finally) the Adelaide suburban fleet one. I started writing this about 2 years ago after finishing the Melbourne one, and obviously I've been distracted several times since then - but it's something I'd really like to finish off, and I'm doing some work on it this afternoon. It's pretty detailed, so it's going to take a little while still to come together - but it's getting there. The above picture is one I took at Adelaide station in 2013, when the 3000/3100 class were still yellow.. and the Redhens were still allowed on the main line! This video will cover everything from the Redhens through to the current fleet, and a little bit about suburban cars in preservation.

The gaps between videos might be a little longer than usual over the next few of months, for a few reasons: First is that I've been giving myself a bit of a break over Janurary, something I didn't do much last year! I've also just done a major computer upgrade, replacing my old PC which was a bit of a frankenstein with some parts dating back at least 15 years. It started having some serious issues towards the end of the Werribee video production, so I decided it was finally time for a major upgrade. I now have myself a computer that actually computes and.. it's really nice! Yesterday I almost got some work done, but then ended up playing age of empires for a couple of hours. The other major thing is that one of my kids is starting school in just over a week, and the other is starting kinder - I'm expecting this to be a bit of a challenging time for both of them, and will likely need to focus a lot of my energy on that. I'm sure you'll all understand these things, just wanted to let you know why things might be a little slow for a bit!

Ok, so the next long line video! The Werribee line video has been doing very well, currently sitting on a little over 55,000 views as I type this. That's similar to what the two Metro tunnel videos had done in the same timeframe, so it's really good to see a lot of people enjoying this format. With all three of the long videos having received a very good response (in fact the Hurstbridge and Upfield videos are still consistently in the top 10 most viewed videos for the channel each day), I've got no doubt that this series is really worth putting the effort in long term. It also caused a record spike of new members signing up here (THANKYOU!), which really helps cement the sustainability of the channel. As many of you will know, I was already leaning fairly heavily towards doing Belgrave/Lilydale next, and the other day I had to go to Box Hill (for unrelated reasons), and found myself visiting a few other locations in the area getting some coverage - yep, we're doing Belgrave and Lilydale! As with the previous episodes, this will of course come together over a fairly long time with other videos happening around it. For those wondering, Alamein and Glen Waverley will be separate videos at a later date - it would have just been too much to do all of them together.

Finally, thanks for all the positive feedback on the G&MR video - it was a fun little in-between video to make, and I quite enjoyed doing the drawing and animation. While it's not something I expect to do regularly, it's definitely a format I'll consider doing every now and then in the future.

As always, a huge thankyou for all your support!

~Martin