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Pick up and read anything about the changeover from steam to diesel on railroads and in ships and you will realize why steam vehicles aren't practical, especially for individuals.

They are enormously labor intensive.

Maintaining a boiler is not something done easily, quickly or inexpensively.

Reciprocating parts (pistons, rods, cranks valve gear) must handle great forces and are not easily kept clean or sufficiently lubricated to prevent wear.

Boiler water of the quality needed to steam properly and prevent corrosion and fouling of the system is not readily available nationwide. Railroads had extensive water treatment facilities and in some cases transported boiler water hundreds of miles to provide fill points along their routes.

Finally, thermal (read fuel) efficiency of steam locomotives (that being what I'm most familiar with) was approx. 6% at the coupler on the latest and most advanced models, versus 20+% on the earliest diesel-electrics, to provide a contemporaneous comparison.

I am a rail fan and absolutely love steam, but there is no economical way that they could compete with the more efficient diesel-electric.

"I am a rail fan and absolutely love steam, but there is no economical way that they could compete with the more efficient diesel-electric."

IIRC, the same (or very similar) arguments have been made for every type of power generation and transmission system we've developed over the past several hundred years. With sufficient investment in solving those problems, we can do so. This isn't to say that it will be easy, or cheap to do, but it can be done. Once upon a time, gasoline engines were literally impossible. Then merely difficult. They were huge, inefficient, and dangerous. The same was true of steam engines, but development stopped on them shortly after gasoline (and diesel) engines became readily available and cheaper to operate. We have better alloys and things like teflon now, that might make it easier, for example. Purifying water is a lot easier now than it was a hundred years ago, so it is quite possible that someone will figure out how to do so for steamers. It should also be possible to figure out ways to recover most of the steam, and recondense it for reuse. That would save quite a lot of money, too, eventually. The factors that steam depends on, vs. diesel-electric (or gasoline), are economic. Change the economics and steam might well look much better. Perhaps even if it is a little less efficient, if it is more cost-effective and/or less polluting.