This document provides an overview of Locobase, a database created by Steve Llanso that contains information on over 14,500 steam locomotives from around the world between 1825 to present day. It describes the purpose and goals of Locobase, which is to preserve dimensional data and historical context of steam locomotive designs. It outlines Locobase's extensive sources, contributors, and growth over time. It provides examples of the level of detail in Locobase entries and discusses Llanso's future ambitions to continue expanding Locobase and using it to explore the important role of steam locomotives in history.

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This document describes Locobase in several different levels of detail. The first section provides an
overview of the project. Next comes an outline of a typical Locobase entry, discusses the editor’s
guidelines in selecting entries and drafting the commentary, and summarizes short- and long-term goals.
Later sections offer field-by-field discussions of data precision, explanations of some of the ratios and
percentages, and outlines the editor’s approaches to ensuring data integrity and accuracy.
What is it?
Locobase is a database with commentary that records as much data as is available on every steam
locomotive produced from 1825 to present. Except for certain exceptions discussed below, this universe
includes every rod-driven steam locomotive that ever operated in commercial or military service.
Why is it?
Locobase’s goal is to preserve as much of the dimensional data as can be extracted from decades of
records, provide context for the individual locomotive designs in both a technological and a historical
sense, and incorporate a wide range of bibliographic sources. Each of these activities intends to orient
any user from any discipline or perspective to the importance of the steam locomotive in creating (or,
some might say, abetting) the modern world.
Who does it?
Steve Llanso has amassed almost three decades of experience in compiling and refining databases of
this kind. He served for six years as weapons editor on an open-source military database, co-authored an
Encyclopedia of Modern US Military Weapons Systems, and has created US Navy and US Shipbuilding
databases as well.
Although Steve has often benefited from the indispensable help of dozens of people from all over the
world, he has drafted all the commentary that is not set off in quotations and is responsible for the errors
they may be shown to contain.
How old is Locobase?
Locobase began as a few hundred index cards in the mid-1970s and entered its digital record phase in
1989. The current editing system operates in Lotus Approach, but the data can easily be exported to a

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Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or a text-delimited file easily queried in SQL. The commentary is also easily
exported to a text file.
[Further history of Locobase: I got into steam locomotives in the 1960s in a very casual way with some
family-owned Lucius Beebe-C M Clegg pictorials and the Encyclopedia of World Railways in Color by OS
Nock. I kept encountering a mysterious "tractive effort" measurement and began a search for how it was
calculated. Eventually, I found the answer in a copy of Matthias Forney's Catechism of the Locomotive in
Tufts University's Wessell Library during my graduate years at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy.
Later I found two editions (1930 and 1947) of the Simmons & Boardman Locomotive Cyclopedia, which
had pages of tables on recent locomotives as well as discussion of various formulas. I began adding data
to a set of index cards that comprised a photo index of steam locomotives. That's how LOCOBASE was
born.
By 1988, my work at the Military Database as their weapons editor led me to buy my first PC. Soon
afterward, I got a copy of DBase III+ and began entering my information in a true database. Because
DOS limited file names to 8 characters, I called my data file "LOCOBASE". (My shipbuilding database
was called MEGASHIP; this has all US Navy ships' key dates. A later one, named after file naming was
expanded is USBUILDER, which attempts to record as many US-built ships as I can get info to. Kind of a
ships counterpart to LOCOBASE, but without the commentary.) After a decade of very fitful data entry, I
transferred the data to Lotus Approach, a very friendly database creator and began serious work in
LOCOBASE beginning in early 1998. Shortly, the World Wide Web began to include search engines like
Google. Google Books appeared a few years later and my access to information just exploded.
From a few hundred entries, LOCOBASE has now grown to over 14,500 entries on rod-driven steam
locomotives (i.e., no geared engines like Shays, Heislers, and Climaxes) from all over the world and all
periods from about 1825 to the present. The total number of individual locomotives represented is well
over 350,000. Wes Barris of steamlocomotive.com has hosted my US, Canadian, Mexican, and
Australian data for years, added several Caribbean countries in 2013, and asked to expand his display to
include all of Locobase in 2015.
Locobase’s Scale

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Some raw numbers as of September 2015:
14,832 entries
Broken by country of first use (not manufacture), US operators account for almost half of that total.
Railways and other operators in Great Britain account for more than 1,300 additional entries. Other
countries with 100 or more entries are France, Germany, Brazil, Cuba, Canada, Mexico, Spain, Austria,
Japan, Australia, Argentina, South Africa, India, Ireland, Italy, and Prussia.
Most recent political entity added: Aden.
Some mosts and leasts
Most heating surface area (combined evaporative and superheater):
Locobase 321 Great Northern (USA) R-2 2-8-8-4 11,462 sq ft (1,065.24 sq m)
Least heating surface area
Locobase 10824 Sultan of Morocco 0-4-0T 11 sq ft (1.02 sq m)
Highest engine weight
Locobase 3300 Erie P-1 2-8-8-8-2 853,050 lb (386,937 kg)
Lowest engine weight
Locobase 9645 Eastern Counties (UK) Inspection engine 2,800 lb ( 1,270 kg)
Greatest cylinder volume (4 cylinders)
Locobase 417 Virginian AE 2-10-10-2 93.2 cu ft (2.64 cu m)
Least cylinder volume (2 cylinders)
Locobase 7394 Corpet (Fr) shown at 1878 Exposition 0-4-0T 0.05 cu ft (0.0014 cu m)
So you haven’t researched all of this alone?
Bibliography and acknowledgments alone would fill a few hundred pages. These include such a variety
of information sources that I can’t list them all. See next question.
What are your sources?
The principal source cited for most Locobase entries will be the one from which comes all or most of the
fielded data. Many entries benefit from contemporary sources for data. These include manufacturers’
data books, diagrams prepared either by the railroads or by the manufacturer, contemporary journal

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reports, jury reports from major exhibitions. Compilations by well-regarded secondary authors will serve if
information closer to the actual locomotive isn’t available.
Many records also include one or more additional credits. These can range from commentary about the
locomotive, historical information about the railroad or the builder, personal accounts of operating the
locomotive or the service.
The first paragraph of the commentary will show the Locobase number and begin “Data from…” followed
by the principal source. “See also” cites a second and sometimes a third source. The first paragraph also
holds production information when known, usually noted as “Works numbers were…in Month Year.” It is
the editor’s intent that every source be verifiable and most entries meet that standard. (The editor cannot
confirm at any one time that all Internet links are still valid.)
Correspondents have contributed all kinds of good information. One of the first was "Brad", a New
Zealander who sent me some emails about Garratts in 1999. Takagi Hiroshi, a Japanese compiler,
posted all of his detailed information on 20th century steam locomotives on an English-language web site
in 2000. He also answered my questions and added still more. A Finnish co-worker at my publishing
company translated Finnish data and commentary. A British writer named Roger Hennessey and I have
traded information over several years. Dozens of others have either posted reams of data or sent
personal emails.
Two comrades in particular always need to be singled out. Wes Barris I've mentioned because of his
willingness to display my work to a larger audience since the early 2000s and his competence in Perl
programming language to make it truly accessible. Wes’s website led an untold number of visitors to
Locobase and resulted in frequent inquiries, suggestions, corrections, and comments that significantly
contribute to Locobase’s quality.
Allen Stanley scanned in more than 400 locomotive diagram books and, characteristically as I would
come to find out, offered the scans in 2005 to me gratis on seven CDs. Allen has continued to amass
thousands of pages of data from many contributors, all of which he has scanned and built into his
Raildata collection. His latest delivery to a group of researchers came in August 2013 in the form of an
external hard drive with 134 GB worth of data.

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I call Allen and Wes LOCOBASE's archangels.
Bob Lehmuth downloaded the first 55 volumes of Baldwin specifications in PDF form from SMU's
DeGolyer Library and offered them free to anyone with a flash stick. (I was delighted in 2012 when I
could return the favor with the last 20 volumes.) I have cited Allen's diagram books or the DeGolyer
books (or sometimes both) in over 6,600 entries.

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What does a Locobase entry look like?
In Lotus Approach, the English-measurement version looks like this:

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If you printed two pages of Locobase back-to-back on a single sheet, you would use more than 59 reams
of paper. The resulting book would be almost 30 inches (762) mm) thick.
hat’s if you print two English-measurement entries per sheet. In many cases, you will not be able to see
all of the commentary.
If you printed two pages of Locobase back-to-back on a single sheet, you would use more than 59 reams
of paper. The resulting book would be almost 30 inches (762) mm) thick. If you put the metric-equivalent
page for each of the English-measure entries on the second side of each sheet, you’d have a book
almost 60 inches (1,524 mm) thick.
See Wes Barris’s http://steamlocomotive.com/locobase.php to see the current web version, which has
fewer data field, but includes all commentary.

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Lotus Approach metric-measurement version:

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Every one of the 14,800+ Locobase entries shows the data in both measurement systems.
14,800+?
Locobase is still growing, passing 14,800 at the end of August 2015. Locobase’s page count for the
commentary alone, when it is exported as a text file to Microsoft Word 2007, and formatted to hold about
400 words per page in Times New Roman 12, comes to over 5,200 pages or well over 1,900,000 words
of text.
What in the world can you find to write about for over 5,200 pages?
Exactly. To borrow the English title of Gustavo Reder’s 1974 book: “The World of Steam Locomotives”.
Locobase naturally focuses on the individual locomotive profiled in a specific entry. But as sole editor of
a self-funded enterprise, I can exercise wider latitude than many such references. A topical index of the
subjects (or a relatively rigorous assignment of tags) would consist of thousands of entries.
For example:
 North American and Caribbean entries (the ones currently available at steamlocomotive.com)
include hundreds of records on locomotives used to support logging and sugar-cane harvesting.
Many describe the rise and fall of a particular extractive empire and the cities and towns that
mirrored the health of their primary employer.
 French Chemins de Fer d'Interet Local were a parallel network of rail lines on the metre gauge
begun in the latter part of the 19
th
Century. National policy encouraged their development to
provide reliable access to local and regional markets at speeds greater than the muscle-powered
means then available. Locobase entries on the locomotives that served these lines includes
discussion of the Freycinet Plan and other contextual background. Similar discussion can be
found in relevant British, Irish, and German locomotives.

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 Locobase’s 8246 entry on the Peckett engines delivered in the 1930s to Christmas Island in the
Indian Ocean northwest of Australia could be tagged “phosphates”, “minor builder”, “fortunes of
war”, “cable portage”, “sea slugs”
 Locobase 7820 describes the rare Allfree-Hubbell cylinder design and 4087 includes information
on the Cleveland brothers’ cylinder design. Selected other US and Canadian entries include a list
of “special equipment” suppliers to show the web of components manufactures that supported
steam locomotive manufacture.
 As lodes of information on locomotives of a particular railroad became available on the Web,
Locobase retrieved and archived the data before it disappeared. I’ve since been able to create
comprehensive sets of entries on the JNR’s 20
th
century locomotives, those of France’s biggest
railway, the PLM, all of Spain’s RENFE (the product of nationalization in 1941), the South African
Railways system, much of Australia and Italy, Rhodesian locomotives, the Third Reich’s
“kriegloks”….
 Dozens of visitors to Locobase’s email at steamlocomotive.com have offered corrections,
additions, suggestions, anecdotes and asked questions like “what are the loads per axle of a
certain 2-6-2 logging engine that needs to be moved?”, “how much water would an 1860s era 4-4-
0 consume climbing up the grade to Apex, NC. Would it need more water?” “My grandfather was
the engineer on the locomotive in this picture. Who’s was it?” Several of them, including Wes
Barris and Chris Hohl, keep me honest by carefully reviewing Locobase sections and suggesting
corrections or additions (or, sometimes, subtractions).
What’s next?
Ambition and reality frequently collide when I consider that question. If I continued to work on just
the material I already have available to me, I could spend several years refining the entries and
gradually adding in new locomotives as I become aware of them. That I’ll do in any case because
it’s fun.
My ambition is to find 21
st
-Century means to explore the information I’ve found and the edited
product that is Locobase in ways I can’t even imagine. As I’ve worked in Locobase, I’ve found that

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steam locomotives were central to almost any significant moment in the 19
th
and much of the 20
th
century, for good and for ill. They operated everywhere and served in any land-transportation
capacity requiring power beyond that that human and animal muscles could provide.
A larger goal is to let Locobase show how absorbing the study of history can be and how much
such study can reward informed speculation with the delight of seeing both “then” and “now” in
new, more intimate ways. On a small scale, for example, when I draft an entry for yet another 4-4-
0 on a US railroad in the late 1890s, I try to see the moment of its creation through the eyes of the
very practical people who needed to buy it. What was in service already? Why was this railroad
interested? Of the many options available for achieving a particular service requirement, what
seem to have guided the buyer?
There are so many ways to examine that moment and how one chooses to look at it can create
new links among events that weren’t even suspected before. My hope is that Locobase would
provide a reliable baseline of data and builder information, an occasionally intriguing comment
that pushes the reader into a different area, and a source of further information.