Little trains in your signatures

[Tom]

About 10 years or so ago, Dan Klitzing made a series of little train gifs. They got pretty popular with railfan websites, so a few others, myself included started making them. We decided to adopt the scale that Dan did his in as a general scale so that each persons gifs were compatible. David Epling of Central California Rails (<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://cencalrails.railfan.net">http://cencalrails.railfan.net</a><!-- m -->) helped me out when I wanted to make my first website. I used train gifs to get my feet wet building a website and one thing led to another, and I ended up modifying several and then finally drawing them myself. Back then, there were about a dozen of us doing it. Now there are about 40 or so that I know of.

Using the marquee tag of a web editor, you can make them move across the screen. After a while, we figured out how to change speed, direction, and eventually how to layer them so that we could have trains passing each other, multiple trains following each other with a dead space between them, and even added scenery, bridges, tunnels, etc in the back and foregrounds of the trains creating animated scenes like a real layout. After a while, people started re-painting our stuff and calling it their own, then had the audacity to INSIST that others get permission to use THIER gifs, some people made them for their sites, but blocked downloading of them, refused to share the gifs, etc. That is fine, if you create something, it is YOURS to do as you wish. However, 2 things bugged me: #1 most of these folks did NOT create their gifs, they just ripped them off from those of us that were making them from scratch and calling them "their own", and #2 I did these for ANYONE to use FREE of charge, links, strings attached or anything else. If you visited my businesses website and wanted to use the graphics and photos there for your site, I'd probably have to politely decline; that is my business, my line of work. However, if you found train gifs or some other type of graphic I did like that and wanted to use them, don't even ask, just use them. Enjoy them. Didn't cost me nothin' to make anyway. If you have a series of Train gifs that were originally drawn by me to begin with, you just recolored them, then I might just use them, and no, I wouldn't beg for permission. I shouldn't have to. Besides, the original group (we have/had a group at Yahoo Groups) operated by a gentlemans agreement whereas we would openly share our little train gifs for each other to freely use and as a courtesy, we'd link back to their sites too. We just shared them around, they all fit together perfectly with the scale Dan came up with. The fact that others were so anal about theirs really turned me off to it eventually, and so I quit making them years ago save for the occasional ones I modify to suit projects I am currently working on.

I didn't really do much steam though, some of the originals that drew these really did a FANTASTIC job with moving side rods and animation. I have some that even have chuffing steam and exhaust. Really trick. I was never THAT good at it. We mostly used Paint Shop Pro 5 or 7 as it comes with Jasc Animation Shop (which we use to make mars lights, steam, smoke, flashing beacons, side rod play, etc.) and a few people even used MS Paint, but I've never heard of anyone using Photoshop. Kinda overkill. Paint Shop Pro is really user friendly for making these things. Some folks even got real trick weathering stuff, making open autorack loads, etc. One guy even made airliners that would take off and land in his little scenes and one guy that used to be on the original Gauge with us, made a scene one time that made it appear you were sitting in a Budd Vista Dome going through the Canadian Rockies watching a little world of animated, moving train gifs go by out the window. The visitor could even control the speed of the train they were in! Call it virtual model railroading I guess.

Train Nut I see took the LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG way around the roundhouse doing Autocad, Photoshop, etc. Kinda like killing flies with a sledge hammer! But whatever works, you just string them together in a row, being careful not to make it *too* long, as the longer you make your train on a forum like this, the smaller it'll be height wise to compensate. Josh, to answer your last question about the train I made you, I *could* add the other cars you requested, but it'd shrink the height of the train down, and being only 256 color .gif's, they'd distort. I just wish the forum had a (scroll) or (marquee) function, then we could make them however long we wanted and they'd MOVE across the screen.... (hint hint mods....)