I've been chipping away at the site since the last update, and there are a few new things I wanted to point out.
Manufacturers
Manufacturers answers a question I always found surprisingly hard to look up: who actually built what.
Every builder, model and class
Every builder behind something we cover now has its own page, from the British steam builders of the 1860s right through to Downer, UGL and Progress Rail today. The diesels and electrics are grouped by model number, so you can see at a glance that the C44aci covers everything from Aurizon's 6000s to PN's 93s, or which Clyde models ended up where. Steam engines are counted straight from the class rosters, and the multiple units and railmotors have a list of their own.
It works the other way too. Every class page now says who built it, with a link through to the builder.
A history for each one
Plenty of these companies didn't stay the same company for long, so each builder also has a short history covering when it started, who took it over or merged with it, and when it closed. There's a source for every date, so you can check it for yourself.
The timeline
The timeline on the Manufacturers page puts them all side by side. You can follow Walkers and Clyde into Evans Deakin and on to Downer, or watch Neilson and Dübs merge into North British in 1903.
You can narrow it down to steam, diesel and electric, or multiple units, zoom in on a particular era, or switch it to a plain table if that's easier to read. It works on a phone too, and you can pinch to zoom.
Still a few gaps
I couldn't find much at all on Evans, Anderson, Phelan & Co or the Phoenix Engine Company at Ipswich, and both built engines for Queensland Railways. If you know where their histories might be found, I'd love to hear from you.
Photo Coverage
Photo Coverage keeps score of our photos. Every class page pulls in photos tagged on Flickr, and this page shows how much of the fleet has been photographed, who's been out with a camera, and which preserved engines are still missing.
Where we're at
At the moment we've got photos of 425 of the 3,576 locomotives and units on the site, so there's a long way to go. A big thank you to Shawn4468, who's photographed 289 of them single-handedly.
Adding your own
Adding yours is easy. Open a class page, copy the tags from its Photos section and add them to your photo on Flickr. It'll show up on the class page within the hour, and on the coverage page after the next site update. If you're anywhere near one of the preserved engines, the wanted list is a good place to start.
On This Day, on Instagram and Facebook
On This Day has been on the site for a little while now, with over 3,300 dates from Queensland's railway history. Nearly all of it is Peter Burkitt's work, researched and compiled for the old qrig.org timeline, and it's some of the best material we've got.
It seemed a shame to keep it tucked away, so we're now posting it each day to Instagram and our Facebook page, with a photo from the archive and what happened on that date. If you're on either, give us a follow.
As always, if something looks wrong, let me know.
Dean