blackwolf wrote:

A good few years ago I was driving home through the back-roads of Dorset in the late dusk when I met coming the other way a convoy of about four traction engines leaving the Great Dorset Steam Fair. They were all running with paraffin lamps, and each was towing a traditional living van and a water cart. I had to pull over off the road and got out to watch them pass. It was a fantastic evocative sight, and apart from my car pulled into a gateway there was nothing in the picture that couldn't have been 100 years earlier. Extremely memorable!

When I was a sprog there was a chap with a farm about three miles up the road who had a number of steam-rollers, and I used to love watching when he took them out. With the diplomacy of a very small child, I used to call him "monkey-man" because he was rather dark and swarthy and had very long arms. Long gone now, of course, and even the farm isn't a farm any more, just a rather posh housing development.

We miss these things when they're gone.

Ads90 wrote:

Huttopia wrote:

Who will take on these lovely machines when the current generation of owners / enthusiasts move on? I wonder the same with the steam train enthusiasts.

It's a good point, many of the more mature enthusiasts would remember steam from their childhood and I'm guessing the nostalgia is strong.
Whether there will be a similar number happy to give the same time & effort in 20, 30 or more years is questionable.

Huttopia wrote:

Who will take on these lovely machines when the current generation of owners / enthusiasts move on? I wonder the same with the steam train enthusiasts.

You would be surprised how many of the paid and volunteer staff at a Heritage Railway I volunteer at are between 16 years 40 years old, they work in all departments of the railway. Don't make old people mad.
We don't like being old in the first place,
so it doesn't take much to us off.

Richard