JR-小さい

First and foremost, JR-小さい is *NOT* an official Japan Railways page. The logo was made to simulate the official JR logo, because the project is in fact a small scale version of Japan Railways. Quite a few modules will not be prototypical, but in essence it's still a small version of JR, so you could look upon it as a tribute to the excellent railnet in Japan.

So, what is JR-小さい and how is it pronounced? Simply put, JR-小さい is mostly a homepage about the progress of my personal Japanese train projects. I picked a more general name because I hope at some point to attract others with similar interest and possibly go to exhibitions, maybe even form a small club. As for the pronounciation, 小さい is pronounced "chiisai", and it's Japanese for "small".

The project started small and simple. I've actually always been interested in trains of all shapes and sizes. My first trains were Lima H0, which I sold in order to buy Minitrix. After moving to Norway I switched to Märklín H0, mostly due to lack of availability of other brands and scales. I'm still planning a layout in H0 as well, but that's something for the future.

I've always had an interest in high speed aerodynamic trains. The first model I had was an N-scale Bachmann of the original orange TGV. My first Japanese train was Kato's 800 series Kyushu shinkansen, which I bought through the local store. This was the only Japanese train they had at the time (it was imported by Noch.) The amazing detail and great running characteristics on the train got me looking for more Kato trains, and after a little research I came in contact with Heiko Stoll at Japan Model Railways. He answered many questions I had about Japanese Trains. My first order there was a Tomix DD51 and the MicroAce 9633 depot steam engine.

After that you could say I got hooked and the collection started growing steadily. Within a few months time I had a full 0 series shinkansen, 100 series shinkansen, 500 series shinkansen, full m250 container express, and many others. Collecting has slowed down a bit as I am more actively planning various modules, but the end of the collection is nowhere in sight ;)

The homepage

The homepage was designed from the ground up, is inspired by Apple's general designs and uses the colour scheme of the Kyushu shinkansen. The dark red is the colour of the traditional Japanese laquer often used for bento boxes. The design is kept minimal and consistent, so that it doesn't draw too much attention away from the actual content.

For those who like technicalities, the page was initially designed in Photoshop, and then converted to XHTML using mostly TextWrangler. All code is handwritten without the use of WYSIWYG programs such as Dreamweaver, Frontpage or iWeb. The design is driven by stylesheets, and uses transparent PNG's, which required some additional code to get to work in Internet Explorer. The page is constantly being tested in Safari, Firefox 2 and Camino on the Mac, and Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 6 and 7 on Windows.

After some searching and thinking, I decided to use an open source CMS. My initial plans were to code my own as a Mac program rather than an online CMS, but I just didn't have the time for it. Right now, we're running on the latest TYPOlight webCMS. It doesn't come bloated with tons of features, it has good customizability, and best of all, it outputs decent xhtml code.

Most pictures on the page are taken by myself unless noted otherwise. Pictures are taken using a Sony Alpha a100 with a variety of lenses including a 105mm Sigma macro lens, 18-70mm Sony zoom lens and on the rare occasion a 10-20mm Sigma wide angle lens. Other than the work-in-progress pictures, all pictures are taken using a Lastolite tent for soft lighting, or outside in the sunlight. Pictures of modules I try to take in natural light whenever possible. Work-in-progress pictures are taken where ever I happen to be sitting while working on something.

Any of the pictures on the page that I took are free to download and use. If you need the original RAW file, please contact me. Note that the RAW files the Sony Alpha creates are propriety, and might not be compatible with many programs. I've tested them to work with Adobe Photoshop, Adobe photoshop Lightroom and Apple Aperture. If you just want a higher quality version, I can also email them or put them online in a variety of formats.

Contacting

To get in touch, please fill out the form here.

Should the form not work, you can send an email directly to martijn(at)jr-chiisai(dot)net. Be sure to replace (at) with @ and (dot) with a dot.