North British Railway (NBR)

It's about time that I added an illustration or two to the NBR section. The problem is that the liveries are confusing, to say the least. E F Carter's book gives some information but even that (usually my mainstay) is less than clear in areas. So, if anyone has any information or leads that I can use please mail me at - mail@elegantsteam.com.

Opera Browser

I downloaded Opera Browser tonight. Anyone who runs a web site needs to know how that site will look like on different browsers. I knew that while Internet Explorer and Firefox are the most popular browsers that my visitors use and handle the site well I noted that Opera is the third most popular. So I downloaded it and tried it out. The interface was rather different, of course, but there was no steep learning curve. Two features that stand out are the Speed Dial and the Magnify tools. These I will use when testing - very useful indeed. Anyway the site looks good on Opera so there we are - another useful tool.

Visitors

Elegant Steam (www.elegantsteam.com) has now been on the net for 5 weeks and in that time it has received over 4000 visitors. Amazing!!! When I first started it I thought that there would be a small interest but the sheer number of visitors is rather astounding. The site is non commercial butI have to admit that I have wondered that if I produced colour prints, say, in A3 size, what would be the reaction ? I have to say at this point that I am not thinking of going commercial. My illustrations are really for my own enjoyment and if someone likes them as well, that's great.

Have you ever had the aggravation of waiting for something to happen and it doesn't? I'm at that stage at the moment. Living in Southern Spain with a wife and two siamese cats means that any books I need have to be sent for from UK (sometime USA). Usually they arrive in a week but, right now, I'm waiting for two books on Pullman cars in order to finish an illustration of a 6PUL composite diner. And I'm still waiting !!

Today I added a Google translator to a few pages on the site. I tried it out in preview and it seemed to work OK when translating into Spanish. I just that it will do the same when translating into other languages. We'll see.