Vehicle Picture Collection - General Information

On these pages you find a huge collection of 2D vehicle pictures. The majority of the pictures are drawn in the scale 1 pixel = 10 cm. Such pictures can be used in several programs: and JavaScript packages: This programs use different graphical formats, especially, how they store transparency information and phase pictures for animated parts.

Additionally, there are pictures here used by other programs in other scales:

and there are also pictures from other communities/persons primarily creating vehicle drawings only for viewing them:

As the above list shows, the many of the pictures were drawn to let them move on the screen by a program. That is the main goal of this collection - the collection is in first place for the Traffic / WTraffic screensaver. Pictures originated from other sources are converted for use in Traffic. The most spectacular change is made for the "Showcase" drawings - 4 views of a staying vehicle (for example: Pixel cars), which are cut to 4 individual pictures, left and right side are for moving, often becoming animated wheels, front and back pictures are for background scenes. The pictures were made transparent, so that they can move before background pictures - photos, drawings or mixed constructions.

This hobbies - drawing small 2D vehicle pictures either for screensaver programs/other animation possibilities, or only to enjoy the static views - lost their popularity in the last decade. There are pictures from more, than thousand authors in the collection, and only a few dozen are active today. Some homepages of the authors are still online without updates, but many of them disappeared. The Wayback machine preserved some parts of them, but especially in the early times the Wayback Machine did not stored the pictures, only some HTML pages - so this collection is the only place the drawings are available.

Vehicle drawings in multiple scales
The original goal to publish this collection was to support the communities of the different programs, and to assist the cooperation. To make a really good picture the most difficult work is finding documents, drawings, and photos about the original vehicle and then to draw it. It does not matter if you draw it for Railway32, MM&MM, BahnLand, Train Side View, TrainKit or Traffic. The differences between the programs are large enough that it is not a simple change from BMP format to GIF or vice versa; it is hard to automate even with existing general-purpose programs. However, the work of converting formats is not a job for a human; it is a task for a machine. So, I collect pictures from all the communities and try to convert them with my program to other formats, whenever possible. There are, however, several limitations: The advantage of having pictures with differing scales is not so obvious (besides being able to run them in programs, which can handle them: Traffic and TrainKit) as the different communities do not interact much. There are 3 different small scales (TrainGif, Train Side View 30 and TrainBanner) that are not so far from each other. One cannot use the pictures together in the same train, but it is possible to use them in different scenes sequentially - the difference is small. The available set of vehicles in these scales is very different: the TrainGif scale has the richest North American collection but only a few European vehicles; TrainBanner has a huge Japanese collection and an acceptable set of European vehicles, but very few American drawings.

Each community can use the collection of the others as a source for its work. Resizing the pictures in either direction does not result in high quality drawings, but it can give ideas about what to draw, what is missing, and if the existing picture is in a larger scale than the target scale, one can use the existing drawings as a base for further work. Additionally, a large scale picture resized to a smaller size (at least to half size, but possible more) can be used in the screensaver, when moving, one cannot look thoroughly at each pixel. It is a good auxiliary solution, when a whole theme is missing from a scale, but is drawn in another.

This site is in no way a replacement for the authors' sites, because the individual style of the source page and the descriptions about the vehicles are missing here. You often find photos and the history of the vehicles on the authors' sites - and you will find the newest pictures on the authors' sites first. There were many sites from railway clubs or fans, who draw or show only the vehicles they are interested in or which they own--and they know the most about them. The author's site is only one click away from you while browsing this collection. Just click on the Homepage icon.

Sometimes the author's homepage doesn't contain any pictures for the screensavers. It may deal with other railway-related themes. Many authors show their screensaver pictures only in collections or on other homepages than their own.

As time goes by, many homepages with vehicle drawings - which served as a source for this collection, disappeard. A few of them is preserved in the PiXelTRain Museum. If you have somewhere on your harddisc a saved site with vehicle pictures - either your own site, if you lost interest in the hobby, or someone other's site, with vehicle side drawings, which is not online any more, please contact me by e-mail to e-mail address as an image