Updated: 9/13/2022
Charles Dockstader was an aerospace engineer and steam enthusiast who took it upon himself to create the very first valve gear simulators in the early 1990s. Over the years he continually added new valve gear types until reaching an impressive number of 42 different simulations. Only the most obscure types, such as those included in my Forgotten Conjugated Valve Gear Mechanisms list and Bullied's Leader are excluded. Although he passed away in 2011, his valve gear simulators are still available to download right now and thanks to my efforts will hopefully continue to exist for the forseable future even when the site they are hosted on is shut down. I am hosting the files on this site. Just in case this site is taken down, as a last ditch measure to preserve them I have created a torrent so that the files can still be accessed through everyone else that downloads and seeds them. The first version of Charles Dockstader's Valve Gear Simulators were written to be compatible with DOS. The version available now is compatible with Windows 95 and up. However since the programs have not been updated in many years the sound features are broken when running in windows 10. Funnily enough they do still work when ran in Linux or Mac using Wine, so in a way his programs are more compatible with Linux and Mac than Windows now.