Posted: 7 March 2012, 11:15:04

We've had a lot of members join both websites recently so we thought it was time to welcome new people and do a quick reminder of some of the ways you can use and interact with the sites.

Now that you have registered you are able to personalise sightings, keep an eye on vehicles via a “watchlist”, upload photos directly to both sites, contribute to this forum and comment on photos and vehicle entries.

If you forget your login details please don’t register again – email us and we will sort it out.

When submitting sightings please make sure you are contributing to the right website! ontrackplant.com is generally plant vehicles - tampers, cranes etc; departmentals.com is generally rolling stock - test trains etc. That is the easy way to remember it! If in doubt, have a quick look through the photos section. There is obviously some cross-over but it really helps us if you submit to the right website and in the correct format as per the instructions on the page. Multiple vehicle sightings are submitted with commas between (no spaces - ie 73423,73435,73307 or 975000,975046 etc) and date is in the format yyyy-mm-dd i.e 2012-03-07.

For departmentals.com we are not really interested in historical sightings of vehicles before they entered departmental service – a good example being the Gatwick Express vehicles. Likewise photos of former departmental vehicles once they have been restored back to passenger use at heritage railways.

Photo approval – as the uploading procedure has become easier it means we also have a lot more photos submitted to us. If we get sent lots of very similar photos then we can’t use them all. Likewise if vehicles are obscured or the photo is blurred it is unlikely we will use them!

We’d like to thank everyone for their submissions – news, sightings and photos – it all helps to keep the site up to date. In particular we’d like to thank the growing number of people within the railway industry that help us out with updates and allow visits to depots – it is much appreciated.

Ben & Vince