The circle and the letter are generated by the CSS stylesheet used by the new forum software. The admins can change that stylesheet if they wish or they can enable the permission to allow users to upload an image themselves. At the moment they have chosen to do neither as they are focused on getting the function of the forum working correctly rather than the visual presentation of it to our liking. Perhaps once everything is back to normal, they will again offer a range of locomotive icons for users to choose from as their online face. Instead of side profile of locomotives, they could have head on images of a range of locomotives from which to choose. Somewhere recently, I stumbled upon the request from Auran for those old locomotive images to be submitted by users. It specified the size allowed and other rules. Auran chose which were suitable. Of course, they could run afoul of trademark restrictions if a logo was visible on the front of the locomotive.