A header identical to the one at the top of this page automatically appears at the top of every page served from the TrainWeb.org web server. You do not have to do anything to your web pages to display the header. The TrainWeb.org server software automatically adds this header to the top of every page before the page is displayed to visitors.

As indicated in the header to this page, there is a "Search" option in the header. This search option uses "RAILsearch.com", the most comprehensive search engine for rail in existence. There are over 11,000 rail related websites indexed in the RAILsearch engine. Only the main page and the first few links are indexed from most rail websites in this search engine. However, websites on the TrainWeb.org server automatically have every page at every level indexed! This is a major benefit to websites hosted on the TrainWeb.org server. You do not have to submit your website to the search engine. Your website hosted at TrainWeb will be periodically re-indexed automatically to reflect pages that you have added, deleted or modified. Since this feature will appear at the top of every page of your website, visitors will have an easy tool to search for any rail related information. Your website will be included in the search engine database, so every search also includes a search through all the pages in your own website!

We are aware that many of you might not like the idea of having this header automatically inserted at the top of every page served from your website. We are not asking anything more of you than we are asking of ourselves. You will find that the top of all of TrainWeb's own pages have banner advertising. Actually, there is a lot more space devoted to advertising on the top of TrainWeb's own pages than what we place at the top of your pages.

Although we would prefer to have content rather than advertising on the prime location at the top of each of our pages, we do not believe that this advertising detracts from the popularity, usefullness nor esthetics of our web pages. We don't believe that this header has to have a negative impact on your web pages either. Since you are aware that this header will be appearing at the top of each page in your website, you can design your web pages so that the header looks like an integral part of your website.

Why will we be adding this header at the top of each page at your website? We will be doing it for the same reason that we add banner advertising to the top of every page on our own website. Our sponsors provide the financial support to make TrainWeb possible. Without their financial support, the www.TrainWeb.com website would not exist and we would not be able to provide you with free web hosting!

The only reason that we are able to attract and keep our sponsors is because we provide a lot of exposure to them via their clickable banners that appear throughout TrainWeb. We have always required that the websites hosted free at TrainWeb display our sponsor's banners on their main page. From experience, we have learned that there were a number of problems with this old requirement, such as (1) many webmasters would forget to place the banners on their main page which meant that we had to waste a lot of time checking websites and communicating with webmasters, (2) many webmasters did not know how to properly paste the banner code to their site which became a technical support problem for us, and (3) the use of our resources by sites hosted free was growing far faster than the exposure that they were providing for our sponsors.

Let me expand a bit on that last point. Our old requirment was only that the sponsor banners had to appear on the main page of each site hosted at www.trainweb.org . But, there can be many pages at each website. Some websites hosted on the TrainWeb.org server have hundreds or thousands of web pages. The number of visits to these web pages is growing rapidly. These visits are placing an increasing load on our servers and on our bandwidth. However, with our sponsor banners only on the main page of these websites, the exposure of our sponsors on TrainWeb.org sites is not growing commensurate with the drain on our resources. In order to obtain additional resources to meet the growing needs of the TrainWeb.org hosted websites, we are going to have to obtain more sponsors. The only way to attract and keep more sponsors is to provide more advertising exposure for sponsors. Thus, we have had to implement a method that will automatically provide exposure for our sponsors on every web page that is served from the TrainWeb servers.

Automatically adding the header to the top of every page hosted at TrainWeb.org does solve all three of the above problems. Webmasters no longer have to insert any code into their webpages themselves. This means that we no longer have to periodically check every website hosted on TrainWeb.org. Since the webmasters no longer insert the code themselves, there is no longer the technical support problem of helping webmasters that do not know how to properly insert the banner code. But most important, by having a sponsor banner automatically appear at the top of every web page, the exposure of our sponsors grows directly in proportion to the amount of resources being used by websites hosted on TrainWeb.org! If you get a lot of visitors to your website, you provide a lot of exposure for our sponsors. If you have a limited number of visitors, then you corespondingly provide a limited amount of exposure for our sponsors. Thus, the more TrainWeb resources that you use, the more exposure that you give to our sponsors. That seems like a very fair way of doing things.

The more exposure that our rail related sponsors get in the rail community, the happier they will be. The happier they are with the effectiveness of their advertising at TrainWeb, the easier it is for us to keep existing sponsors and attract new sponsors. The more sponsors that we have, the more we can afford to provide additional resources and promotion of the websites hosted at TrainWeb.org!

We hope from the above explanation that you will understand why we must add this header to the top of each page of your website and will cooperate with our efforts. You don't need to make any changes to your website. These headers will be automatically inserted at the top of every page of your website as those pages are served by our web server.

Trainweb has examined a number of free web hosting providers and the methods that they use to insert advertising. We believe that our method of inserting advertising is the least intrusive and most effective of all methods that we have examined. Pop-up ads get in your face, right in the way of the page that you are trying to view. It is also possible for a visitor to close a pop-up ad before the contents of the ad are ever displayed, thus reducing the effectiveness of the ad. We do not like pop-up ads and we will continue to avoid them at all costs.

Despite our best reasoning, we know there will still be some of you that will chose to leave TrainWeb rather than have this header on your pages. For those of you that do decide to leave, we would appreciate the courtesy of being notified once your website on the TrainWeb.org server is no longer being used by you. We plan to do new heavy promotion of the sites that do remain on the TrainWeb.org server. By knowing which websites plan to stay and which plan to leave, we can begin to devote our energies to those websites that will be staying with us. Please click here to e-mail us of your intentions.

Please remove all TrainWeb and sponsor banners that you may have inserted on your web pages as a result of our old requirements. This does not include the RAILring.com HTML code. If you are participating in the special promotion to websites that belong to the TrainWeb RAILring program, then you should still keep the RAILring HTML code in your web pages.