Thanks so much for the hard work and expense (not to mention blood, sweat, and tears) you've put into the website. It's appreciated more than I can express.

And for those who sit behind their keyboards, never lifting a needlegun, but only flaming or picking nits, I offer the timeless words of Sergeant Hulka in "Stripes": "Lighten Up, Francis".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B65mtE2TN1w

That's what I was thinking too. However, here's the full story.
http://www.ncry.org/roster/s_03sv/sv3.shtml

Just look at the two photos on the page. One shows the locomotive as number 309 with a full-length saddle tank and a low-set cab. Scroll further down the page, and you'll see the photo of the locomotive after it was bought from Kennecott and given several modifications that gave it a more "classic" appearance. The locomotive, apparently, has retained those modifications up to the present day.

Do note that the second-to-last paragraph on the page contains the inaccurate information discussed earlier in this thread.

And, Mr. Steaminfo, I too thank you for all the hard work you've put into the site. I've used it quite a few times, and it is very handy indeed (especially the comments/notes section). Keep up the good work!

And I can only imagine how many emails you've sent, since those don't factor into either total. On postage alone, you've sent 10,000 letters unless you like FedEx.

Sisyphus pushing his stone?

All that time you spend on that, you'd be better off engineering a scheme that lets readers submit and maintain the data instead of you. Maybe not Wikipedia exactly, but set it up so contributors develop a reliability rating. People would jealously guard their reliability ratings, and that would tend to strongly motivate accuracy. At first you'd have to "seed" the reliability scores by fact-checking like you now do... but after awhile the crowd would do it. Newbie shows up, says X, and 3 reliables say he's wrong -- you don't need to research that :) And that would take most of the work off your table and greatly increase your eyes and ears on the world.

Actually we used to have an 8.5x11" packet we mailed to people explaining what we were doing, showing examples of pages from the website and requesting information regarding their locomotives. We even included an SASE for their reply. They cost about $1.50 each to mail. We sent over a thousand and got exactly 36 replies. At which point we decided we were being stupid and stopped doing the mailing.

One of the responses was truly fascinating. They taped our SASE to brick, blotted out our address, replaced the return address with our address and marked it "Return to Sender". It came to us with $5.76 postage due.

I like your idea for user maintenance, but am extremely dubious that it would garner any more support than other initiatives we've undertaken. Nonetheless, I like the idea sufficiently that I'm going to look at the software engineering required to achieve it.

I’ve never seen that before now, but it is classic, no doubt. Someone once said that arguing on the internet is like fist fighting with someone with two already broken arms; even if you win, you have nothing to brag about.

I have written magazine article on a couple of non-RR related subjects and I am considered by some to be sort of an expert on these topics. In the past, I’ve gotten e-mails from people demanding I post retractions to the magazines because my info is wrong, and they cite incorrect internet-based nonsense that I know to be wrong. I’ve even gone so far in the past to scan documents or photos I have to show my information is right (or more importantly, there is wrong), and I have never gotten a response from anyone I did that with. Now, I just delete them and try not to get too stressed. There will always be people out there who are convinced they are right and no amount of evidence will change that (I married a woman like that, which has led to some pretty strained moments from time to time when I know something isn’t what she thinks it is and I refuse to back down). You’ll never get through to people like that so there’s no real point in trying. But as for the original post, you could always post these ‘corrections’ with the evidence below to show the ignorance of the poster for all to see. I’d call that a WIN for you!

Whenever I'm assailed by people who have garnered flat-out wrong information from dubious sources, I simply quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "You may be entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts." That seems to shut them up PDQ.