Today, December 5th, 2025 is the official end of steamlocomotive.info. The hosting company we'd been using no longer supports ColdFusion, the language in which the site was written, and while there are other hosting companies that do support it, they are much more expensive and introduce technical complications which would require a massive rewrite of certain portions of the website.

As some of you know, I'm being treated for a very aggressive form of kidney cancer, and am not expected to survive more than a year or two, so remediation of this website issue is very low on my priority list.

Thanks you all for visiting.

Regards

Doug-I am so sorry to hear about your diagnosis. Will be praying for you.

I'm sure all of us here have our collective fingers crossed for a positive outcome. That's way more important than a website.

My best wishes for a miracle or at least that you will be comfortable over the coming months.

At least all of your work hasn't been in vain. It is available at archive.org. I just checked and went through several screens. All of the links I checked were there with the appropriate information and photos.

I am verry sorry for you too.

Perhaps someone here can get all the sources from you und upload it on Github, so perhaps there will be someone to recode it later on? AI wll become more and more helpful, and perhaps a simple command will be enough soon to have the whole project translated to PHP.

Against my better judgment, I've requested a backup of the database and FTP access, so I can retrieve all the photos. I

Doug, we're thinking of you and your progress as you face the demon of cancer. You will never be alone.

Doug, Best of luck to you, and THANK YOU VERY MUCH for your contributions over the years. Hopefully either the diagnosis is wrong or the miracle you deserve will materialize in good time.

I've got my fingers crossed for you,
Sammy

I'm sorry you weren't able to find an easy solution to keep the site going and I'm also sorry to hear about your diagnosis.

Your site was a wonderful resource - thanks for putting so much into it!

On a similar note - does anyone know who ran RailServe and what happened to them? That was another site I used often to help plan rail themed trips.

Doug, if we can get the site up and running for one last hurrah, I have a tool that can take a functional snapshot of it so it's saved for posterity.

That's what I did for this site: http://wmwestsub.rrarchives.org/

The problem: Saving it for posterity only snapshots a static site, which in a database like this will eventually render it as obsolete as the old 1967 U.S. Steam Locomotive Directory by Victor Koenigsberg.

The eventual mission, SHOULD we earn the willful cooperation of Mr. Bailey, should be twofold:

1) to transfer the database, architecture, data, photos, and all, to a more up-to-date system that can be migrated and updated as needed; and
2) assigning both proprietorship and future administration to a new entity that would be able and willing to oversee future editing, updates, and hosting.

Rest assured that a couple of us have been quietly working in the background, consulting experts who know more than we do about computers and the internet to tackle at least the technical end of it, with the longer-term goal of being able to either preserve the site as-is or make a proposal to an appropriate non-profit to seek transfer to a new owner and overseer (the NRHS? the R&LHS? the Age of Steam Museum? any of several rail museums with infrastructure and willpower? even some entity overseas?)

One of my contacts, ironically now based overseas in another hotbed of historic preservation, began to segue into how this probably needs to be a new "business model"--creating "continuity planning" for online "preservation projects" such as this. There have been many, many examples of this left and right--entire online forums dedicated to such things as endangered animals, niche car models/makers, local history clubs, craft techniques, etc. disappearing overnight with the death or anger of one person. I've recounted how BridgeHunter.com more or less got locked down overnight with the death of its creator, and it took over two very expensive years to bring it back, albeit with nowhere near the same user-contributor constant updating it once enjoyed. I, too, have witnessed over a decade of hard work building up a community and following all devastated by one newly-elected officer cluelessly ordering a wholesale change in the wrong manner just to be "new and improved," and seeing a website/forum that used to garner tens of thousands of views weekly get reduced to a mere dozen or so views a week now--effectively dead, along with much of the organization in question.

For the moment, at least, let me also thank Brother Bailey for what had become one of my more used online references in spite of both other "competitors" trying to do the same thing and my own personal library. I fully understand the mindset of other priorities taking over at a time like this--having had way too many friends two generations older, I've seen it too often for my age.

Maybe it's simply some mindset or mentality that's alien to my experience, but it seems to me that it's worthless to build up such a wonderful resource without exercising some willingness for it to be continued past the creator's existence. It would be like watching Steamtown or the Age of Steam Museum be scrapped and bulldozed after the passings of Blount and Jacobson, respectively. Or writing books that self-destruct when the author passes. Or the Disney enterprise perishing in 1967.

Some of us doggedly want to keep your work alive, Brother Bailey. Please allow us the option to try.

(Now, the bad news is that just about everything I said above also applies to this very website--including, but not limited to, covert efforts to explore hijacking the site wholesale if need be........)

I am thankful for the kind words from everyone. Hosting, coding, maintaining and managing steamlocomotive.info HAS NOT been a positive experience for me. I've tried (and failed) to write an appropriate response to all the suggestions, but have failed to do so.

Therefore I will offer a kindly suggestion: don't waste too much time, thought or effort in figuring out a way to preserve the site. I don't want it preserved. And that should be the end of that. :)

Throw it all in the dumpster all you want.

Do you have any idea how much of our critical archives we've dragged out of dumpsters?

I've signed up for a hosting plan that will permit me to bring the website back up. It is expensive, but offers a 90 day free trial. If I can get it back online in 90 days then I'll continue the service, if not then all bets are off. I'm not happy about it, but I think it can be done.

Unfortunately, I will have to consider doing something I swore I would never do. That would be monetizing the site somehow. This might be accepting advertising (which I truly detest), or making the site available by annual subscription, probably something like $25/year for access. Another possibility would be to sell the site to someone with masochistic tendencies once I get it up and running again.

Why I am doing this? Because my grandson was heartbroken that grandpa's website went away. We're living on Social Security and VA Disability pay. (Service connected, 100%) so I'm going to need to offset the costs somehow. And trust me, the Donate button on the front page of the site produced an average of $5.45 per month in revenue.

Now that I was finally able to log in...

I will gladly host the site, FOR FREE, and take over maintenance of it. I feel it should be kept alive.

I would need help converting it to something other than Coldfusion though. My web hosting company, BlueHost, does not support ColdFusion. They support plenty of other stuff though, including a variety of databases.

So, that's the offer. If somebody will help Doug convert it, I'll host and maintain it no charge. Yes, I would probably add a few ads, done in moderation, to help with fees but I'm not looking to make any money on it and know it would be a net loss. I'm fine with that. I already lease a server there.

If anyone is interested, speak up!