TEXT VERSION ONLY FOR EASIER READIBILITY BELOW THIS LINE
MAINLAND TOUR: THE HISTORY OF ONSR
On the official SL Wiki site, the history about the Okemo, Nakiska and Southern Railway (ONSR) is pretty clipped: "ONSR was initially a private build, mostly built by Veronica Quackenbush. She acquired the right of way through several sims over several years. Kitto Flora scripted the cars and switches in Smithers Sim for her. Later, Kitto Flora was temporarily commissioned by Linden Lab to build the extension of the ONSR to the Wengen Sim."
In attempt to prepare additional educational information for my upcoming Mainland Tour of the Snowland Subcontinent, I was reaching out to Veronica to ask if she would provide me some more interesting facts about the history of ONSR, one of the most visited destinations in the area.
What I expected to be a few simple sentences that vaguely sketched the most important key facts, turned out to be a fascinating gem of Second Life (SL) history about friends who spared no effort to realize their vision, about the passion for creations from the SL community for the SL community, and about the impact of ONSR and similar projects that eventually led to the development of the Linden Department of Public Works (LDPW), and the Moles.
Since Veronica is an exceptional storyteller, the following text is, with a few minor changes only, the original rendition of her narrative.
"This story is probably going to be more long and rambling than you need but it will be easier for me if I don't censor myself too much", she started her introduction, and she kept her promise. "Once upon a time, I and a few friends of mine who were mostly from the Virtual Artists Alliance group, were taking a truespace trip across Sansara. Truespace refers to moving around walking, driving, flying, sailing, with or without vehicles but absolutely avoiding the use of teleporting, or in other words, moving around as one would in 'real' space.
One of the informal goals of the trip was reaching the South coast of the Snowlands but at the time, as it is still nowadays, no official Linden Lab (LL) road reached the location. The closest developed road still ends at Benham siphon. However, there was a seemingly passable valley that allowed one to walk or fly to the coast in the Berthould Pass area. The area was sparsely built up, most of it being a wolf sanctuary with a lovely little chapel in the most scenic part of the gorge. That chapel was more or less located in the spot where the bridge across the ONSR tracks at Okemo Canyon station stands now.
We liked this location a lot. Over the course of the next few weeks, whenever we visited the Snowlands on one of our truespace excursions, we stopped by the chapel. Then one day we came by again with a few friends whom I actually wanted to show the place, since they had not seen it yet. But alas! The chapel was gone.
Like so many SL builds that are just beautiful but not commercial, it had been sold off. Not only was the chapel gone, but the land had been divided into small parcels with obtrusive 'For Sale' signs. Imagine the cheesiest strip mall you have ever seen, and then exaggerate that a few times.
Several members of our group had already a Premium account, and more or less spontaneously we decided to buy up all the parcels we could. By the time we left for the day, we had bought up enough of the offered land to merge about 70% of it back together into a larger sanctuary.
Then the brainstorming started about what we could do with the land, since we wanted to keep it a unified whole. And the best way to do that seemed to be using the valley as the natural right of way that it was. We had recently visited Heterocera and the SLRR so it seemed a nice idea to start something similar in the Snowlands. The plan of a scenic railway emerged.
Since we started from this part of Okemo Canyon, and the LL right of way extended halfway down Okemo Gorge, our sights were mostly on the southern part of the valley. Hence the original name proposal: Okemo, Nakiska, and Saimaa Railway. We were sort of aiming for the South coast, and Saimaa seemed a likely goal. But we never made it to Saimaa so it became Okemo, Nakiska and Southern but still 'ONSR'. Even though eventually we extended far more North than South.
Gradually, we built some test trackage and some trains to run on it. One of our big initial problems was that although some of us were passable builders, none of us knew much about vehicle scripting. We experienced a few adventurous mishaps.
In the meantime, acquiring the right of way on private land was an extremely laborious process. From the middle of Okemo Gorge where the LL right of way, which is still undeveloped, swings off towards Virrat, to the protected hill at the end of Berthould Pass, is all private land. So most of the hard work was buying land, which had quite a few challenges. To begin with, we had to wait until the land was for sale, or try to talk to the owner and see if they would be willing to sell, or to subdivide the land to sell us a part only. It required a lot of negotiation with the neighbors. Some had other plans with the land that we were hoping to be able to use.
We were aiming for establishing a right of way on a relatively narrow but very long parcel. And only a few parcels in SL are naturally configured like that. Even in a valley like Okemo Canyon, most parcels are rather square. So whenever we were able to buy some of the land we wanted, we were typically buying a lot more than we would have needed. We subdivided those new pieces of land instantly and hoped for the best that it wouldn't take months to sell off the parts we didn't intend to use. At some point or other, my crowdfunding friends and I owned the equivalent of several full sims, of which about 80% or more had to be sold off again. There is hardly any of our present neighbors along the private part of the route who didn't buy their land off of our leftovers.
So things soldiered on for 3 or 4 years until we eventually had a continuous right of way from Okemo Gorge to Berthould Pass. In the meantime, we had finally found a good scripter to help us. This is where the oblique connection with LL came in. Our vehicle scripter Kitto Flora knew a few Lindens personally and managed to kindle their enthusiasm for the project.
Originally, the idea was just to get LL's permission to extend the ONSR track across the relatively short gap from the north end of private land at Okemo Gorge to the Benham border at the siphon where the official LL road ends. However, the Linden friends whom Kitto had approached about the ONSR project were so excited that they more or less spontaneously suggested to extend it to Chalet Linden which seemed to be a suitable railway terminal station since Chalet Linden was also one of their busier infohubs at the time.
There is still a certain aura of mystery about the 'Race to the North', as we might call it. Because it literally happened in a matter of days when Kitto worked overtime to extend the ONSR North over LL land after his Linden friends temporarily allowed him to build under their public land group, using as few prims as he could. Most of us, including me, basically woke up one morning to find that instead of stopping in the middle of Okemo Gorge, the trains ran all the way north to Wengen and the Linden Chalet.
In hindsight, one could say it was a Mole project avant la Mole. The LDPW did not exist yet, and nobody had ever heard of the Moles, who were introduced only about 2 years later. ONSR and similar initiatives could be partially considered as initial sparks for LL to develop a regulatory framework for partnerships with private community projects by residents, and regulated content creation arrangements which we know nowadays under the labels of LPDW and Moles."
Despite the introduction of newer building options such as Mesh, ONSR is still more or less in the same state as it was at the time of release. Veronica explains that some of the main reasons are, that updating needs careful planning, and that many of the volunteers of the first hour have moved on to other things. And those who are still active don't always have the expertise to upgrade things. "At the moment, my hopes for the ONSR are mainly to find other starry eyed amateurs willing to take it over because I have been at the Peter principle limit since 2012." Until then, ONSR will keep its heritage as an important and nostalgic piece of SL history alive.
