For quite some time steamlocomotive.info has had the capability to display a map of a steam locomotive's location. This is and was dependent on someone actually supplying the geographic coordinates, and someone else finding the time and energy to do the data entry that was required to get the map to display.

I've been working on two things for the web site that are centered around this issue. The first has been great fun to implement. We're testing the new code right now, and if it continues to perform reasonably, then we'll turn it on for the general public shortly.

If you have a smart phone (iPhone, Android, or RiM) or a tablet computer (iPad, Android, WebOS) that has geolocation services installed (most do) and if you have it turned on (again, most people do). You'll be able to browse to a locomotive that you're visiting in the website, tap one button and send the geographic coordinates directly to our server.

Second method. If you have a GPS (or are a Google Earth fanatic) and can get the geographic coordinates of a steam locomotive you can fill out our little on-line form and instead of having to wait for someone to remember to read that mailbox it'll automatically be read by our computer, and the map submitted to our editors for approval.

Third method. If you contribute a photo of a locomotive, and your camera embeds geographic coordinations in the EXif data in the JPEG (a lot do), then when your photo is added to the locomotive, a map will automagically be generated.

Planning on turning this stuff on, on Saturday. And of course we'll add a nice help page to explain it better than this.

Enjoy

Sweet! Thanks for all of your hard work.

Sounds really cool.

I do have one question though... How do you handle multiple locations for the same engine? Typically this would involve a fairly small region, but for a lucky few locomotives, we're talking vast distances. "Where's 844?" is a lot like "Where's Waldo?" during select times of the year. So what happens when you get many shots from many locations? "Hey, check out this neat shot of 4449 in Michigan, think I'll stop by and have a look at her..."

The photo exif trick only works if the locomotive has no photograph at all, and the resulting map is checked by a semi-living human editor (me) or a real-live one (the other guys). Similarly if one location has been submitted and verified the system doesn't accept updates until an editor clears the geolocation information for that locomotive.

Very nice, but given that there are several operable locomotive near by that are limited to a small amount of track 7 or 8 miles, if I was to submit coordinates, would you want a general site, for example the shop track where they most frequently live, or some other criteria.

In two cases there is a shop track, or engine house with three locomotives that will swap locations with some regularity.

Similarly, sites like California State Railroad Museum occasionally rotate static locomotives around.

Randy

From my understanding, the geocache feature is more geared towards "hey there's a steam engine in a park in the middle of these woods, how do we get there" sort of thing, as opposed to a museum on the side of the road with 10 steam engines in the facility...am I right?