I have this "friend" who is really into steam trains. He's gotten a couple wonderful hour-long DVD's of steam train excursions, sold by a variety of train aficionados. I've also discovered one great website, Mid-Hants Railway, that has dozens of short videos that are perfect.
Do you know of similar resources? Thanks!
UPDATE 12 August 2006: According to my visitor logs, this is a very popular entry. I have yet to find other sources of video that I can download like at the Mid-Hants Railway page. But, many of the UK-based rail museums and enthusiasts posts photos and some video. The trouble I have is that the video is frequently embedded Flash or other players that make it difficult to download directly. (My friend likes watching them over and over again.)
Here are some useful pages and searches:
- RailPictures.net almost a Flickr for train spotters
- Richard Leonard's Steam Locomotive Archive links to many other locations
- RailRing webring
- Rails USA webring (more models and modern railroading)
- The Steam Locomotives webring (primarily German-language sites)
- Rail Enthusiast webring
- Google for steam train videos, note that many of these are sites that sell videos. We like the full-length ones, but it's also nice to find short clips
- and videos at YouTube or Google Video
UPDATE: 29 August 2006.
I just discovered another mother-lode of videos and links to more at Steam on the Web. There are several galleries of videos, and the owner links out to even more photos and videos elsewhere.