steamlocomotive.info

For quite some time there's been a bug in the administrative process that approved user contributed photos. If the contributed photo had spaces or certain punctuation marks in the file name, it was impossible to approve the photo from the administrative interface.

Thus, photos would accumulate until I had the time to go into the server and change the filenames. This morning, I found and fixed the bug, and we can approve your submissions from the managment interface.

Have a nice day,
Doug

Link: http://www.steamlocomotive.info/photobrowse.cfm?bn=Fanie%20Kleynhans

Fanie Kleynhans has granted us permission to use his photographs of South African steam locomotives on our website. You can see all his contributions by clicking on the title of this post, or following the link below:

Fanie Kleynhans Photographs

I particularly like this image of SAR 2-8-4 No. 3655:

Photo Copyright (c) Fanie Kleynhans

Link: http://www.steamlocomotive.info/vlocomotive.cfm?display=20002

A site visitor, Tommy Gears, has contributed five images of Guayaquil & Quito locomotives in Bucay, Ecuador, for which we'd like to extend our thanks to him. One of the locomotives is shown in the image below:

Copyright (c) Tommy Gears

The steamlocomotive.info website has the capability to add a banner above each locomotive display page promoting the website of the locomotive's owner. See the link below of an example on an East Broad Top locomotive:

East Broad Top RR No. 15

The banner above the locomotive photo was supplied by the East Broad Top folks. If you're responsible for a steam locomotive and would like to have our site display a banner with a link to your website when your locomotive is viewed, here's the deal:

1. The banner can be a maximum of 640x80 pixels, and should be a Jpeg or a GIF.
2. You should provide a URL for your website for the system to link to when your banner is clicked.

These two items can be emailed to info@steamlocomotive.info or dougb@sunserver.com. Be sure to clearly identify the locomotive (or locomotives) for which the banner is being provided.

We hope you'll find the feature useful.

Regards,
Doug

Long ago and far away, when I first started collecting the information that became this website, the intention was to put the photos, videoclips, database and a browser written in Borland's Delphi language onto a CD-ROM. With about 650 Megabytes of data on a CD we made decisions that took this into consideration. Photos were constrained to 540 pixels wide, and the first 800 or so photos were resized this way. We don't have the originals anymore, the slides having been returned to their owners, and the machine on which the scanning was done long since consigned to the scrap heap.

But...for all photos contributed after September 2002, when the website first went on line, we DO have the originals, in whatever size they were submitted. I thought it would be nice if we created a way for you to see these wonderful images in larger sizes, and we've been working on that for a few days.

Here's what we've done. We've added three more image sizes to our system (640 wide, 800 wide and 1024 wide). If an image's original width was greater than or equal to 640 pixels, we created a new image 640xwhatever for that locomotive. If the original was 800 pixels wide or larger, we created one 800xwhatever, and so on.

Most all of our site visitors know if you click on a thumbnail image, you get a display that looks like this:

When viewing a locomotive, as above, if you click on the image of the locomotive, you'll get an enlarged version of the same picture, 540 pixels wide. Our new feature adds buttons at the top of the image for large picture sizes. It looks like this:

Note the buttons labelled 640, 800 and 1024 at the top. Clicking any one of these will reload the page at the higher size/resolution.

Hope you enjoy the new feature.

Regards,
Doug