International Steam Locomotives 2024

It's less than 1/100 second to midnight effectively all over for Real Steam in the world. I believe the following is the short list of countries where there was traditional revenue earning steam in the closing years and, in most cases, the amount was tiny, usually industrial and often even seasonal. I don't believe that the numbers ran to double figures anywhere even in China.but I am not sure what the situation in Bosnia is fluid..

Asia: China (industrial/provincial railways, Sandaoling finishing), India (Ooty and Darjeeling, effectively tourist operations), Indonesia (seasonal industrial fireless, no longer any conventional steam by 2021, a little steam in 2022), North Korea (marginal, steam at Chongjin steelworks, off limits to foreigners).

Africa: Botswana (industrial, operation reported finished in October 2016), South Africa (industrial, finished in August 2015), Zimbabwe (industrial, potentially but not active 2014, using rented NRZ steam in 2017, but probably finished by late 2018)

Americas: Brazil (industrial, finished by November 2014)

Europe: Bosnia (industrial), Germany (industrial fireless),  Poland (semi-real and subject to suspension),  Romania (industrial, assumed finished, although charters are still possible), Serbia (industrial, assumed finished as I have had no reports since 2010), Slovenia  (industrial fireless), Austria (industrial fireless)

Broken links are an occupational hazard for a long running website like this. I run Xenu Link Sleuth once or twice a year (the latest one was in early January 2024) which churns out a list for me to work through although not all domains will allow such apps to 'crawl' through them. At other times, it reports apparent bad internal links in other domains. It runs in the background and takes several hours, then checking and annotating the links occupies my spare time for at least a couple more days.

All is not lost, the 'Wayback Machine' https://archive.org/web/ keeps 'images' of sites, generally just text, not images, and they can be accessed by entering the required URL. For that reason these days I leave bad links visible (with text struck through) so you can copy and paste the necessary to see what is held.

In October 2016, 'internationalsteam.co.uk' migrated to a new host in a transparent manner which should not have been noticed by regular visitors to the site. For over 10 years, I had had access to space provided by my friend John Crellin. However, it was time for a more than amicable separation, the hosting market is moving in favour of the consumer, I now have a cheaper package and more space which is good news at a time when advertising rates are in decline. John has put in a lot of effort for me behind the scenes and I would like to thank him for his support.

For 14 years, this home page was on 'steam.dial.pipex.com'. After I returned to the UK from China in 2011, it finally moved to 'internationalsteam.co.uk', which, with 'chinasteam.co.uk' used for mainland China, had actually had most of the content for several years. Once I was totally free of the internet restrictions imposed on those who live in China, there was no point in continuing to pay for a Pipex account and any references to Pipex URLs you may find elsewhere will not work. In March 2013 I gave up the 'chinasteam.co.uk' domain and the English language material on that site has moved to 'china.internationalsteam.co.uk'. Links within this site have been changed but existing external links will no longer function.

As for contacting me in a Pipex free world, many of you will know my "gmail" email address (it's on our DVD pages) and I can always be contacted via the email address below. As always, please put a meaningful phrase in the subject line, it does help on those mercifully rare occasions when real emails drop into the spam filter - I do quickly scan my spams before deletion but mistakes can and do occur.