Why I'm distracted and haven't made my real puzzle train [Solution Posted]

Solution by request!

I thought this puzzle was going to be easy, because I used one very typical method that is seen time and time again in the forums.
I italicized multiple letters. Typically we collect those letters and string them together and append them to http://steamgifts.com/giveaway/<letters>/
(Don't forget that last slash, that'll get you every time.)

However, I couldn't just give you five letters. I gave you instead... 17.
That is way more than is necessary for Steamgifts, Itstoohard, imgur or pastebin (to my knowledge).
You needed next to decode or figure out which characters were necessary.
And that was the next basic hint that was encoded into the message.

If you took the first letter of each line, and strung them together, you received the correct instructions:
"use every third char"(acter).

So if you looked and found every third character in the 17 that were given to you, you got
hhjUr + url = http://steamgifts.com/givewaway/hhjUr/
which took you to the GA for Stranded in Time.

When I added the hint, I reorganized the paragraphs by putting line breaks between the words created and I bolded the first letter of each sentence. Originally the paragraph line breaks were after a period at the end of a line.

Stranded in Time had the easiest puzzle which was simply a hidden five character code.
If you found it, you did the same thing, attached it to a steamgifts url to move on past the locked door.

The next five cars were similar to one of my other puzzles, but much simpler.
Encoded in the following five cars (aside from random key drops)
Where one hidden letter per car. If strung together and added to a steamgifts url
You'd get to the last 17 GAs.

Hidden in those GAs were multiple Keydrops.
All were hidden, but some were broken up over a few cars, one was broken up over all 17 cars, etc.
One was encoded by Base32 I believe... I don't remember.

Either way, most people followed directions and left me a note at the end, and let me know if they took a keydrop.
But not everyone. Makes me sad. Anyways... Hope you all had fun. I'm going to go back to working on harder things.

If you haven't done it yet, read the puzzling guide. It'll give you starting points for lots of the puzzles on the forums, but won't solve them for you.

Original Post

GAs open 9/3 11:59pm PST
Close on 9/6 at 12:00pm PST.
Apologies, all bundles again (But hey, if you didn't get them before, here's a chance again!)
Cars: 23
Levels: 0-3
Points for Train: 226
Difficulty: Beginner Harder then Expected
Rules: No working together please... ON this one, you shouldn't need to.
Hints: If I have time... but I doubt you'll need them.
Other hidden Oddities? I'd love to know if something snuck in

I can't focus, too much going on.
I went to one service today,
I have another tomorrow,
and another on Saturday.
It's gonna be busy.
So without further ado...

Unfortunately, this is an pre-apology puzzle train.
Sorry for you, but I'm planning a very hard train.
Everyone will be welcome join this one, because after

everyone will hate me. Unfortunately, because of recent
very sad events, I can't focus on creating a good train ATM
effectively. My grandfather whom I loved very much
recently passed away. He has been fighting cancer for 7
years and this was the third cancer. He finally was too

tired to continue. Unfortunately just this past week,
he passed away. Fortunately it was very peaceful and
it happened while he was sleeping. He definitely deserved
rest after all these years. He will be remembered by so many people.
Despite all that, I created this train so that YOU

could have fun. This one is fairly simple. And I
have misplaced a few things in here that needed
a new home, aside from the GAs. So look carefully,
really, really carefully.

Gratz to the first solver: mandrill
5 Key Drops Found