Steam Locomotive Information

Everyone, I'm sure, has seen the What's New button on the website's front page. I will freely admit that that page was designed in written in about 30 minutes back in 2003. I have never, ever liked the way it looked, the way it was organized, etc. So today, I replaced the contents behind the button....

If you look at the front page of the website, you'll see a button, just above the Donate graphic labelled Change Report. You can click on this, provide a date (or a month) and it will show you, in a reasonably tidy fashion, all the changes that were made to the database of locomotives on that day or...

In the Notes system that allows you to attach Notes to locomotives, I discovered a bug that has existed since 2003. It's been fixed and you can read about it here https://steaminfo.wordpress.com/2020/06/11/the-notes-system/

Considerable enhancements have been made to the map system that displays maps for locomotives. You can contribute GPS coordinates in several convenient ways. See https://steaminfo.wordpress.com/2020/06/10/the-location-button/ for more information

I am adding near daily posts to the Webmaster's Blog (available from the front page) describing what's going on with the site. In the past I rarely did this, but Wordpress has supplied a new editor which makes it easier (and more fun) to write the blog posts. So if you're interested in the ongoing r...

The site changes to improve thumbnail handling for linked images has been completed throughout the website, and thoroughly tested. New site backup made as of 4:54 am today.

I just spent about 4 hours trying to chase down a bug in the website. The site worked fine in Firefox but failed (sometimes) rather dramatically in the Chrome web browser. When this happens, it is often a problem in a difference in the way in which one browser rendered html tags versus the other. It...

45 locomotives have been added to the database and website, mostly in Spain. This was a result, in part, of discovering a data import error from about 10 years ago that prevented a part of the file for Spain from being processed properly. Added this locomotives manually. Also added the Spanish regio...

One of the peculiarities of the data which underlies steamlocomotive.info is that it was imported from James Hefner's Surviving World Steam CD with his permission. The database used by his CD was Microsoft Access and somehow, during the import, spaces were compressed out of existence in certain fiel...

At the suggestion of one of our editors, Steve Frost, the country of Kosovo has been added to the system. Kosovo is recognized as an independent country by most of the world's nations. If you use the graphical browser (otherwise called maps) to navigate the site, Kosovo is not available there yet, b...