Our “list of stuff we want to drive” is pretty danged long. It reads like a hit parade of awesome iron. From a blown alky altered to a monster truck and multi-engine pulling tractor, the basic theme is excessive horsepower. Weirdly (or not) sitting above all of those is a steam locomotive. Amongst the biggest, heaviest, and most powerful vehicles man’s feeble mind has dreamed up, the steam locomotive was the pinnacle of transportation technology for decades around the world. For a long time they were basically Earth bound space ships, shrinking time and distance.
Outside of the obvious reasons of wanting to drive one, this video really lays it all out. Just look at the cab that the engineer works in. There are gauges, dials, valves, handles, and right in the middle is a coal fire burning at about 1,000 degrees. To top it all off you can barely see where you are going and any hope of an emergency stop is gone after the massive machine works up a decent head of steam. It is easy to see why the men who ran these giants in the days of yore were named engineers. Look at all the stuff they had to pay attention to!
In 25 years there will probably only be a handful of people left on Earth that could operate a steam locomotive. That’s kind of sad in a way.
They’ve been out of service for so long that there’s probably only a handful now.