Dear PugDot Community,
Today, Rail Road of Fun turns 10 years old. I can hardly believe it myself. What started with a typo in its own name as a hasty reset after the Floridian Felines fiasco, Rail Road of Fun (RROF) has become the most involved, expansive Minecraft server I’ve ever hosted. From the golden age of early 2016 to the legendary Christmas party of late 2017, there have truly been some defining moments in the server’s history.
2015
Rail Road of Fun was not my first Minecraft Server. That was “The Mall,” which was created all the way back in mid 2013. In 2015, the iconic “Happy Garbage” world was created just months before I moved to Florida, solidifying my core friend group. Happy Garbage was the server that initially established the themes of towns, transportation, mini-games, and creativity that Rail Road of Fun adopted at its inception.
It wasn’t without its problems, though—Happy Garbage was messy and had gone stale by the summer of 2015.
After moving to Florida, I started a new Minecraft server—Floridian Felines—which replaced Happy Garbage. Inspired by Gavin’s Griefed Server, Floridian Felines would be my first server to incorporate plugin technology, allowing for multiple worlds on the server. This was also the first time we had WorldEdit, among other tools.
While our attempts to make a Floridian Felines a public mini-game server were unsuccessful, we did learn a lot about server management and organization.
However, we didn’t learn quickly enough: we had no real backup system in place and, in the days leading up to Christmas of 2015, we discovered that a former friend of ours had griefed the core areas of the Floridian Felines server. The world was beyond repair.
With no backup and world tools being much cruder back then, there was nothing to do but shut down the server and start fresh after Christmas. This event marked the end of servers on the original Mac min—from The Mall, to Happy Garbage, and every other server up to that point.
On December 26, 2015, a new world was create: Rail Road of Fun. The early days of RROF were very different from how they are now.
The first things we built prior to the new year were the spawn gazebo, bridge, tunnel, and original spawn station platform. Then, we built self-contained plots surrounded by a train track, still visible today. However, it was soon apparent that we needed to branch off from here.
Inspired by world history classes, we decided to create “empires” on the server, with the Apple Empire being the notable name to stick around on some signage close to Spawn (if you know where to look). This idea would not stick, either.
2016
I remember logging onto the server to find all my friends building a town just past One Week at Anthony’s (OWAA)—a new game which was held in a monstrosity of a building. This town did not have a name (and never would!). It wasn’t part of an empire or region… it was just the town.
In my opinion, this was the true start of our server, and this was also when the iconic Main Street was built, featuring the original houses, shops, post office, and even the AFK hotel.
Early server events, such as the heavy snow and lightning “tornadoes” would happen in the town around this time, too. There was something going on all the time.
During the break from school, I never needed to text anyone to hop on the server—they were already on! OWAA and Jonathan’s Funland would also became fully realized and flourished as the town continued to sprawl across RROF.
2017
2017 was a relatively slow year on the server. A lot of members were pushed out or left due to conflicts or societal pressures from middle school. However, it was still a notable time for RROF. For one, there was an incident where somebody crashed the server with continuously lit TNT. We had to roll the server back months to an old backup, leading to the permanent loss of things like the Bob Duncan dungeon game (among others). I believe this event was what the Lepeiu’s Grief Ride was based on, which, ironically, is also lost to time.
To bring life back to the server, we needed a new player base, and to do that we needed to get slick with how the server was marketed. The PugDot name we know today was created around this time to solve the lack of identity shared between projects. It’s hard to believe that Rail Road of Fun itself predates PugDot as a whole, but it’s true! This was also the year we switched to the streamlined IP of play.pugdot.com, replacing the antiquated rrof.minecraftnoob.com address we used before.
This would also be the first year we began hosting our annual holiday event to mark the anniversary of the server.
To promote the server, business cards with the server IP were distributed, and brochure invitations to the Christmas party were handed out to existing players. This created more buzz for RROF in a time when Minecraft itself was in decline.
The Rail Road of Fun Christmas event of 2017 marked a special moment on the server, demonstrating that the server can continue to exist with ever-evolving friend groups and interests. It also set the precedent of hosting events to gather as many people as possible, even though this original event had a low turnout.
Games were polished to be played during this event, including OWAA, Flobert’s Famous, and a new little game called Mansion Mayhem emerging from the back corner of the Funland.
2018 and 2019
The late 2010s were a solid time for Rail Road of Fun, with new players building homes and new areas of the server popping up to support the ever-increasing demand to build. The train network was drastically improved with custom models, sounds, and new tracks. Mansion Mayhem expanded from one mansion to ten, including a hotel and the original implementation of Santa’s Workshop.
Rail Road of Fun lived on, fostering new towns, rides, and memories to be shared.
2020-2025
The year 2020 started off like any other year on Rail Road of Fun. Mini-games were further improved, and Mansion Mayhem began to outgrow the command block version on RROF.
Once Mansion Mayhem was spun onto its own server, however, traffic to Rail Road of Fun started to dwindle. New players were rarely granted access to RROF to preserve the server. Rather than being the central platform, Rail Road of Fun sat dormant in the background, only to be used for parties, new rides, or looking back on old memories. Most of the time, Mansion Mayhem was regularly seeing updates with no attention given to RROF.
In 2024, Rail Road of Fun was updated to the latest version of Minecraft in hopes of bringing life back to the server, but it seems like the writing was already on the wall. The update caused more harm than good, breaking all Command Block games, the trains, and all the rides. Very little has changed on the server in the past year since that update.
Present
Here we are today, December 26, 2025… 10 years later. What a wild journey. Like every aspect of life, nothing lasts forever, and the only thing constant is change.
Today marks the end of Rail Road of Fun.
Even though Rail Road of Fun is shutting down, this isn’t goodbye. The memories, the friendships, and the world we built together aren’t going anywhere. When the server goes offline in the new year, I’ll create a definitive world archive so its legacy can be preserved and revisited for years to come. Rail Road of Fun will always be a part of us—no matter where we go next.
Where this world ends, another begins.
Best,
AJRUMORE
P.S. — Please share your favorite memories on the server as comments on this post so others can relive the fun!