What is Ever 01, and why? To be frank, I do not know. Its history goes way back to things I wrote years ago, and for now I’m just struggling to put them into form and bring them to the present, and hopefully the future as well. What it is becoming, right now, is a train station.

A train station might be a strange thing to start something, yet for me, it signifies a number of things. The reason why I did it, however, is that a train station was the most amazing and singular build I had ever seen on SL. To be more exact, it was the Tete a Pied shop during its transition to another sim in Winter of 2007/2008:

It was a sim I’ll never forget, and I regret not having taken pictures of it, as it was gone only months later, to be replaced by a rather ordinary looking shop. I just loved the idea, and transition, it was the perfect blend of neccessity and realization. It relied heavily on an Art Noveau style, and was as classy as it could be.

Train stations are meeting points, market places, connection nodes, departures and arrivals. They are the first face travellers would see of a city. There are, of course, other nodes of travel and connection – roads, places, airports, harbours – but none of them create that special blend of history, architecture, communication and technology, which the train stations do.

The theme of the Daltilon Project, when I initially created it, was the connection of the far past with the far future. It was a setting where both the very old and very new existed alongside each other. I think, the only way to understand the presence, is to look at where it points, both backwards and forwards. Any given time is always combining elements of everything that was before, and everything that will become, because nothing is ever lost.

As esoteric as that may sound, I think we always do it instinctively. We set things around us in correlation to historical events, both personal and universal, and we try to imagine a possible future outcome. And so, Ever 01 is just that: A train station of a distant future and past. Its design is mostly defined by the textures I use, and I chose some that were clearly technical in nature, but show elements of traditional styles gone over the top. But a train station would be nothing without trains, would it?

Being a long-time fan of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, I remember one particular scene in the book, where dream returns to the dreaming in a ‘gleaming black and silver deco dream of a train’.

I loved that part so much, that I already tried to make a model of that train in Second Life, but being limited in both prim size and count, so the result didn’t look to convincing:

Now that I have all the prims and space at my disposal in OSGrid, I got back to that project, and finally created the train I always had in mind.

I had thought it was a wonderful interpretation by Mark Hempel (Illustrator of the Sandman issue) of what an art deco dream of train could have looked like, if any designer would have been bold enough to take art deco to its limits and apply it to train construction. Therefor, imagine my amazement, when I found out, that indeed, that train really existed. It was obviously called the S1, and put in use by the now defunct Pennsylvania Railroad.

“Leaders of the fleet of modernism” – Indeed.