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Comment by locallost | Hacker News Reader

> the last dimmers in London theatres being replaced in 1959.

I'm always amazed how long some things were actually used that you'd think stopped being used 100 years ago. Another one, steam locomotives, not completely phased out in some developed countries until the 70s.

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Britain used steam locomotives until the 1980s.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement_of_steam_locomotive...

Germany apparently used them from time to time until 1994, but that was a function of East Germany being behind the Iron Curtain. My grandfather also used punch cards well into the 1980s in East Germany.

Funfactlet: There's a steam locomotive in active duty shunting work trains around at the moment in western Germany. The Riedbahn between Frankfurt and Mannheim is currently being redone and they were short on Diesel engines, so one Verein for historic railroad equipment offered their steam engine and was accepted.

https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/radio/riedbahn-sanierung-dampf... (German only)

Another use for steam engines is for shunting duties in power plants - the engine has no boiler and just gets “charged” from the main plant steam generator.

A similar thing happened here in Australia (New South Wales) in the mid 80s. I was part of a rail preservation group and we were taking a stream locomotive with an empty train from West Ryde Station to Central, from were we were going to depart for an enthusiast's trip. One of the suburban trains was cancelled, so Jock, the station master, asked if we would like to run the regular suburban service, which we did. It was great fun pulling in and watching the passengers do a double take as their regular train turned out to be a steam train.

I guess it required provisioning of the infrastructure, coal and water along the line. And it couldn't be so spontaneous.

>Suburban

I imagine we're talking about a fairly short trip.

Keep in mind that in New South Wales everything is a 'suburb', even eg Sydney itself. It's weird.

It's 19km from West Ryde to Central by rail. In the 80's there was still a modicum of infrastructure available for steam locomotives. I've a memory of their still being a water standpipe at Central. These days you would have to arrange with the local fire brigade to fill the tender.

That would be something very cool to experience from the passenger side:-)

Union Pacific (IIRC) still has one in use, aptly named "Big boy". It's been converted to run on natgas as opposed to coal. Jay Leno recently put out a Youtube video about it.

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