Part-finished animation ......

[xtom]

The train looks great Egg. I would suggest maybe a shadow under it but then you might need shadows elsewhere and not sure if it fits with the look you're going for.

I agree the easy resizability of the svg animation is super nice. In Xara I created my animation at 1920x1080 for video but yeah it wouldn't be as easy to export it bigger in the future if I needed also I imagine the file size on the svg animation is much smaller for web use no matter what size it is displayed at. Looking at your page source I thought it would be a single animation file but it seems to be separate files for different parts, interesting. I have not explored svg much so this is all new to me.

[Egg Bramhill]

Thanks peeps.
Yes Tom, there is in fact 5 animations(1 used twice). Apart from the background image the rest have transparent backgrounds. The total size is 173Kb.
Below is an exploded view of the scene.

DEMO

[Egg Bramhill]

I added a shadow under the train as suggested by Tom. Better or not?

LINK

[handrawn]

I don't think so - it's static, ie anchored to the train; a real shadow would track with the light source and POV, as the train moves along; which sounds like a lot of work without scripts to handle it

[gray]

That just looks wonderful, Egg. I think I'm with handrawn on this one.

[xtom]

I like the shadow but if you feather the shadow edges more in particular at the start/end of the train and make it even more subtle I think it will look good, think of it as just shadowing out some of the ambient light under the train rather than directional sun light. Looks good either way though.

[handrawn]

the start and the end of the train will be an issue

I think it would have to be taken right back under the cable/hosing almost to the bogies to stand a chance of looking acceptable