This is off-topic a bit, but don't underestimate the power of a steam engine. They had those things putting out over 5,000 horsepower in the '30s, which is more than what their diesel-electric replacements produce today, for the most part. The primary reason they went out of favor was their water consumption and the fact that you need two men per engine, while a diesel let you run multiple engines on a single crew with simple electronics. With a system to condense spent steam and modern computerized systems to take workload (and therefore cost) off the crew, steam may rise again for extreme heavy-load applications (railroads and shipping) as diesel fuel prices rise. I read somewhere that some railroad in Switzerland just got some brand new steam engines a few years ago and are using them quite economically.
Anyway, as I said before, that's way off-topic.[/digression]