Awesome sprite!! Maybe try doing to the back wheels what you did to the front.

Thank you, HCGamer!
I would do as you suggested, but the large slab of green on the driving wheels is actually a counter-weight for the running gear, like you'd see on a real steam train.
The smaller wheels wouldn't need a counter-weight because they are free rolling.





I'm afraid that's not dithering. It's an aftereffect my test animator has when compressing files into .GIF, it's trying to make up for the lack of colors in it's auto-compressor by tossing dots around.

Here's an example of the train in .PNG, the file type that will be used in the final animation.





I tried that in the beginning:
 
However I couldn't get the splices in the wheels to resemble rotation, so I opted for solid wheels.

The main issue is indeed the smaller wheels, I'm not sure on how to properly animate them so they appear to be rotating.

Just so you know. While the effect looks interesting this is not considered pixelart.

The train looks nice otherwise.

Right, but I was unsuccessful in creating splices in the proper place to give off the illusion of motion.  Because of this I've switch to solid wheels and now feel they better fit the locomotive.




I'll just ram it in, the animations you see now are preliminary test animations as I simply copy->pasted each frame into a basic GIF animator. The side effect of this tool (and very reason I don't used this animator for finals) is that it only accepts GIFs and will (horribly) compress the image quality into a dotted mess in a vain attempt to make up for its itty-bitty-baby color well.

The reason I don't use higher quality animation tools for testing is well, the current animator does a good job as a test bed and I can still easily see when something is aloft in the strip despite the color lost.

The final animation will be in PNG and 100% unintended dot free.