steamlocomotive.info has been available on the internet since September 1st, 2002. I am its webmaster (please don't throw things at me) and for the last several weeks I have been debating its fate. You see, the company which hosted it has ceased operations and soon the services (bandwidth, hosting, etc.) that kept it operating won't be available.

This more or less means that either I shut it down (and probably heave a sigh of relief) or find it a new home. It is difficult to gauge how much interest there is in having it around. Three years ago, it averaged about 25,000 visitors per month. This is down to 9,000 or so for the past year, and about half those visitors arrive from a search engine, view one page and are gone.

I suppose that 9,000 visitors a month is enough to indicate that there are those who enjoy seeing the site.

It's been an interesting nine years, I gotta say. I would say that negative email regarding the site outweighs the positive emails by about an eight to one margin. To be sure, the site has a lot of drawbacks (unfinished parts, features that work oddly, etc) and I've been hugely unmotivated to even attempt to fix them.

I think the site is worth one more try. Now that I'm semi-retired, and have more time available to work on the miserable thing, I think I'm going to go ahead and move it to a new hosting provider, update it, and be hopeful.

If you number among those who think I should shut it down or give it to someone else, let me know. Otherwise, expect to see the site behave oddly for a couple of weeks as we transfer it to our new environment.

Doug

I for one would like to encourage you to by all means keep it alive AND upgrade it as needed.

I must confess I never go there but view it as a reference resource for others that could play an important future role??

Please let us know what support you need and we'll go from there.

Thanks, Ross Rowland

Keep it up!

I suggest http://www.trainweb.org as an excellent free host for railroad-related sites.

When I was researching a couple of locomotives recently your site was very helpful. It is a great resource and worthy of keeping around. I just checked the Ohio listings and I see a couple of errors, and in a few weeks once the site is transferred to the new host I'll send you an email with the corrections.

Doug

Please keep the site going. Barney and I would miss it very much. We just purchased another engine and your web site was definitely involved in the transaction. This could be a good thing or bad depending on your viewpoint. Barney and I think it was good but I am not sure about our other halves. Thank you for all your work.

John

Doug,

Your site is a wonderful resource. Without it I'd have to actually find my Conrad books...........

I routinely use a mixture of SteamLocomotive.info, SteamLocomotive.com, the two Conrad volumes, and even at times the old 1967 Koenigsberg directory, in research and information-gathering on locomotives. Absent a co-ordinated national database of railroad preservation administered by volunteers nationwide (which I have been dreaming of for over 25 years and seems no closer to fruition, various individual efforts notwithstanding), I would hate to lose any such databases out there, yours especially included.

Yours is still the go-to site for me when I'm looking for photos and info on surviving locomotives. I still get the occasional inquiry from my long out-of-date Surviving Steam Locomotives Photo Archive (parkengines.railfan.net) that I usually try to send your way too. I can definitely understand the lack of motivation though. I really enjoyed working on my site when this stuff was a hobby for me, but once I started doing web design for a living, it quickly lost its appeal as a hobby.

Pretty much the same here. It's by far the best option around when one is tracking down steam engines--especially those either on display or the private ones that stay under the grid.

It's been very helpful every time I've used it to see what's in the area.
Kevin

Might I strongly suggest that you at least talk to J. Henry Priebe at Blue Moon Internet. Henry runs railfan.net and hosts a variety of railroad SIG's and private lists. He certainly understands how to structure a railroad/railfan oriented website.

Unfortunately, when I created the site, I used technologies that aren't widely available at other hosting companies. I've found a new home for it, and am in the process of moving things now.

I'm glad to hear you've found a new home for it.

If things don't work out, or this should ever happen again, I'd be happy to take over the site. I run several railroad sites now, with RailroadForums.com being the largest and best known, and currently lease two dedicated servers for my sites, so I have the equipment and bandwidth needed to provide it a good home.

- Bob Harbison

John -

Another engine? Can you give us any info?

Les