Folks,


There are many lists of surviving steam locomotives from steamloco.com here on the web to J. david Conrads books.

However they tend to be geographical in nature.

If I wanted to see the top 10 or 15 Class One lines and their surviving locos, where could I do it?

My guess is the Southern Pacific has the most, with many lines such as the New York Central with one or two left.

I found to my surprise that the narrow gauge engines of the D&RGW were well up there with about 25.


So a listing by railroads?

Ted Miles

Pre-written lists, no, but you can use the search features on steamlocomotive.com or steamlocomotive.info to run reports for as many individual railroads as you like. I just input "Southern Pacific" in the railroad field on steamlocomotive.info's search form and it immediately returned a list of all SP survivors in their database.

Ted, Go to www.steamlocomotive.info/ and click on search. I tried it just now on Southern Railway and it worked, althought there was one "Colorado & Southern Railway" loco included.

Hi Ted;

One of the advantages of the Surviving World Steam Locomotive database (of which you have a copy) is that you can search and sort by anything you want to.



The group of seven buttons just to the right of the middle of the program toolbar allow you to search by any of the fields. The default sort order is by location as shown here, but you can also sort by number, class, wheel arrangement, owner, builder, and year.

One of my favorite things to do is to click on the "camera" button to show all of the pictures, then sort by year. As you scroll through the records, you are in essance traveling through time, starting with the early locomotives such as the Rocket, and ending with the Chinese and Amusement park locomotives built in the last decade; along with one under construction. One thing that is amazing is how little steam engines have changed over decades; a shock to our culture of planned obsolescence and consumer driven tastes.

You can also click on the "binoculars" button (or press Ctrl-F) to search the database. Notice that you can search by any combination of fields; you can for example search for all of the 2-8-0s built by Baldwin and used by the Southern Pacific that are still in existance. (I came up with seven.)

The only fly in the ointment is I don't always list all of the owners; and sometimes you get more than what you want. For example, in searching for South Pacific Locomotives, the program also returned locomotives owned by "USPotash". But, by sorting the results by owner, and doing a little extra mental sorting and counting, you can get what you want.

You can then click on Listing button (or press Ctrl-L) to get a listing you can then print out. The same is also true for the Surviving World Steamship and Surviving World Steam Vehicle CD-ROMs; you can also search and sort the databases in the database section of the Steam Lizards Group on Yahoo; but only for a single phrase; not the compound search example like I gave above.

It really is a powerfull research tool; I guess too powerful for most folks. All of the various enquires I answer on this forum and elsewhere come straight from my programs. One of the things I am continuely working on is making the location names across the various projects consistant; I often get the information on steam engines at one location from various sources, and have work to make sure the location is entered the same way. Ditto for those steam builders that offered more than just locomotives.

If you need some more help; either call me or perhaps I can show you in a few weeks. We are in the middle of firming up our plans; and will be writing you about our trip soon in the next few days.

-James Hefner
Hebrews 10:20a

Surviving World Steam Project