Ancient Web: The Diesel Shop Filed Locomotive Rosters Like an Ongoing Railroad Almanac

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

An individual locomotive has a number, a builder, a sequence of owners, and usually several stories about where it worked. The Diesel Shop is what happens when railfans decide those details deserve a permanent set of shelves.

Visit The Diesel Shop.

The homepage describes its mission as keeping first- and second-generation locomotives and motive-power rosters available. In its opening note, the site says a Fallen Flags roster was first uploaded in 2001. Later features, including a Missouri Pacific motive-power sampler contributed by Rick Morgan, sit beside that older reference work.

The navigation behaves more like a railway almanac than a general hobby blog. Roster categories cover Class I carriers, regional lines, short lines, industrial operators, switching terminals, passenger railroads, leasing companies, and railroads that no longer exist.

Builders, machines, and the people behind the cameras

A separate cluster of builder notebooks organizes locomotives by manufacturers such as General Electric, EMD, Alco, Baldwin, Fairbanks-Morse, and Alstom. The General Electric section leads to production lists, U-boats, locomotives that survived, and advertising literature. It openly notes when a category is unavailable.

The state-based roster guide is another entry point for readers who remember where they saw a locomotive rather than who built it. The site also has spaces for custom-painted engines, industrial 'critters', fallen flags, railroad documents, and historic locations.

Photographs are credited to individual contributors. A Missouri Pacific locomotive at Jefferson City in August 1974 is captioned with photographer Rick Morgan's name; newer photo essays draw from the Kramble-Peterson Archives and other railfan collections. Those credits turn the site into a chain of personal collections rather than an anonymous data dump.

Not everything here is frozen in the past. The homepage discusses current Amtrak equipment and scheduled future features. That continued work matters because locomotives change operators, new survivors are identified, and old photo collections become accessible.

Its historical significance lies in the accumulation: an early-2000s roster project that became a durable reference, with enough older categories preserved to show why the project started.

Explore the roster index and the GE builder notebook.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.