| Electronic Rail Passes |
| What is an Electronic Rail Pass? For more than 100 years the real railroads issued credit card size 'Rail Passes' to employees, directors and other VIPs, giving them free admittance to the Railroad. Then the model railroaders copied the idea, and the exchange of passes of their model railroads became a sort of a hobby inside the hobby of model railroading. There even exists a SIG (Special Interest Group) in the NMRA: The Pass Exchange Program. One day Jim Thompson, owner of the Cashaway Valley Railroad, had a bright idea: Why not exchange these passes over the internet? Same fun like the paper passes, but it saves all the postage and printing costs! (I'm proud having one of your passes, Jim! And thanks for the fine idea.) |
| Now what should an E-Rail Pass look like? Of course, in the first place you have to design your own pass. For inspirations look at the samples on my pages. On this pass you should include the following information: Name and logo of your railroad - your name, of course - your e-mail address and (if possible) your web site address - pass no., issue date and name of the person who will get your pass. Draw your pass with a graphics program (like Paint Shop Pro, Photo Shop...) which can save your work as a JPEG or GIF-file. A common size of e-rail passes is 550 pixels wide by 350 pixels high. The file size should be smaller than 100 kB, so that you get reasonable loading times over the web. It is a good idea to make a pass template first with everything on it but the name of the recipient, pass no. and the date of issue. Now if you want to send a pass to somebody you load the template, insert the missing data, save the file (under a DIFFERENT file name, of course!) and the send it away... Now I hope to get one of your passes soon. Then just lean back and wait for mine to arrive in your mailbox... |
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