It's that happy time of year when steamlocomotive.info's hosting bill comes due and I have to come on here and ask people to please visit the site and hit the donate button to support its continued operation.

Background: the hosting bill is about $275.00/year. My wife and I are on Social Security and are (so far) successful in hanging on to our home. There's no wiggle room in our budget and no way I can afford to pay the hosting bill.

This is the last time I am going to ask for donations to make this work. I am revamping and enhancing the website, with the intention of selling advertising on it, to pay for its continued existence.

Thanks for reading this.

Doug, you forgot the important part. If one is interested in donating, how do they do so?

Ah... go to http://www.steamlocomotive.info and hit the Donate button on the front page.

If you'd prefer, I can provide the contact information for our hosting company, and you could do so directly as well.

Be certain to leave and continue to promote the "donate" button. Ad revenue these days is marginal at best. Some of my sites have hundreds of concurrent visitors and I still can't cover my hosting fees. (Granted, they're much higher than yours).

Pursue any and all options you can for revenue.

I just donated. This forum and that web site are valuable resources and it would be a shame to lose either. Thank you for your effort to support this web sites.

Sent a little something just now. Thank you for providing this service for us.

I don't have a problem whatsoever in chipping in a few bucks whenever needed. Your site is a vital component to the preservation world and I applaud your efforts in creating and maintaining it.

Thanks beyond words. I am stunned and humbled by the outpouring of support. Our hosting bill is now paid in full until June 2019, a bit more than two years hence. I could NOT have continued this without you all.

That having been said, you are all most welcome to join the Forums on steamlocomotive.info as well, to learn about new things both content-wise and website features that are being added or enhanced.

Again, my most profound thanks. You've enabled me to go forward and to keep adding things to the website.

So, if we join your forums, can we gripe about how museums are doing it all wrong, why the 1361 isn't running, why there are so many idiots out there who question my plan to install a flux capacitor and fly the 643 out of its hole, and, of course, how unfair those good for nothing moderators are?

I thought that's what TrainOrders was for!

No, TrainOrders is for posting what train ran by you 15 minutes ago and castigating the current UP steam program personnel as a bunch of incompetent, inexperienced, destructive know-nothings that will render UP 844, 3985, 4014, and 5511 into complete scrap in no time.

Doug,

Your site is an amazing work of love for steam and history. Thanks for all of the work you have done and continue to do to keep it going.