Lure or not...
The real question is weather you close down traffic all together or run it some days with diesel. We are definitely a steam railroad. Last summer we had extremely dry and hot weather in Sweden for a period of about 10 weeks. All steam trains in the whole of Sweden was totally shut down due to the fire hazard. Except on our line, we ran steam every day! Until early July we ran steam only, but then we concentrated the steam service to the shorter, less taxing and more frequented (by our passengers) section between Mariefred and Läggesta.
To continue to run steam on the longer section to Taxinge was out of the question, long sections with no road access and fairly large forests along the line made the risk too high.
Still, some people called the fire brigade when they saw the smoke from our locos, and could not understand how we dared to continue to run steam. But we have always had a good cooperation with the local fire brigade, even in the earlier occasions when we have had line-side fires. We had no incidents last year.
With big wildfires raging in central Sweden our passengers were more than understanding if they had to travel behind (a too modern) diesel on part of the journey.
I started to push for an investment in a new diesel 25 years ago, but it was not until we started to build the new line that our members full saw the urgent need. Thus we were a bit in a rush, and had not the capacity to do the rebuild ourselves. Thus the loco did cost a total of 100' $, this was all financed by a group of our active members (including myself).
Other locos from eastern Europe have been cheaper, any price level down to 5' $, depending on what you buy and if anything should be done to it.
I was project manager for this project, thus I have collected a lot of information on these locos (without knowing any Russian).
