Thanks for all the kind words.
@jenujacob said:

the "yellowish train" FLOATS!!!!
but these are wonderful images.... what was the render times like??? i ask this becoz its MAXWELL we are talking bout!
Not too bad. I do all my modelling on my laptop. But render on my desktop built just for Rendering... a quad core PC. (I call her Ashley ). so rendering is actually not that bad. The "yellow train" took a little under two hours for instance.

BTW a small short vid of the proj.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8iZ5ydpuCg0

Thanks for the complements. I basically looked for several images of steam locomtives and used refereced a few that had minimal geometry.. ( i knew the file was going to end up being massive with all the trusses and tracks..)
@petercharles said:

Now for the anorak question... is the steam engine based on any particular model?

I agree about the second image looking like a toy. It was actually worse untill i added the Motion blur. Cant quite put my finger on it either.

thanks solo. Ive seen your work on pushpullbar. amazing. I always wondered... what program to you use to render animations?

and...

,Heres some of the stuff i was workin on this christmas holiday. Hope you like. All modelled in SU obviously and rendered with MaxwellRender.

Hey everyone, I've heard about this forum before but never really checked it out till today. Really cool community so i decided to join. Been using SU for about a year now and im trying to step my modelling and rendering skills up a tad. Anyway, Im a student at Morgan State University and it nice to meet you guys.