Ahh, yes, the good old days...when men were steel and cars were wooden.

Boys, back in my day, we changed lower main bearings on diesel engines at 200,000 miles. A lot of perfectly good bearings went into the scrap bin; they were nowhere near being worn out. We did major overhauls at 500,000 miles, which included replacing all assemblies, liners, heads, injectors, rocker arms, lower mains (again) oil and water pumps, governors, etc. Then lower mains again at 750,000. At 1 million the engine was yanked from the carbody and a rebuilt one installed. The old engine went to our rebuild shop where it was torn down completely and everything was replaced, including the crankshaft and camshafts.

Today, nobody wastes time on changing lower mains unless something shows up at the oil lab that shows we should. There was a lot of other stuff we used to do that isn't done any more, simply because the years of experience showed we were doing a lot of work that didn't need to be done. Our maintenance procedures and policies were derived from what had been standard for decades on steam. It took a while for the top brass to tumble to the fact that just because a steam locomotive needed it's wheel trued or tires changed every year or so didn't mean a diesel couldn't run for years and many more miles before any such work was needed.

The 500,000 mile overhaul isn't done anymore, either, except on switch engines and it may take them 15 years to accumulate that much mileage. No steam switcher could go 15 years without several major overhauls. It's just as well to let road units go 800,000-1,250,000 miles and then do the major. It only takes 6 or 8 years for a road diesel to accumulate that many
miles. Most steam engines didn't rack up that kind of mileage in 10 or 15 years, and would have had to have 6 or 8 major overhauls to go that far, in any event.

Things have changed a lot. And it will take oil at around $500 a barrel to make anyone take any kind of steam locomotive seriously. And you can bet that whatever they come up with in that event won't look, sound or act like any steam locomotive we've ever seen before.