Posted on 06/16/2018 10:54:25 AM PDT by Simon Green
Hold onto your engineer caps, railroad history lovers.
Seventy years after the First Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869, the steep Rocky Mountains of Wyoming and Utah were still giving the Union Pacific Railroad trouble.
Despite having massive steam engines, the Union Pacific, one of the biggest railroads in America, still struggled to move heavy freight trains over the mountains and would often have to use multiple locomotives to get trains to their destination. This practice required more workers and more fuel. In 1940, the Union Pacific’s mechanical engineers teamed up with the American Locomotive Company to build one of the world’s largest steam locomotives, a class of engine simply known as “Big Boy.”
Now, six decades after the last Big Boy was taken off the rails, the Union Pacific is rebuilding one of the famous locomotives in honor of the upcoming sesquicentennial celebration of the first Transcontinental Railroad. It’s a project so ambitious that Ed Dickens Jr, a Union Pacific steam locomotive engineer and the man leading the rebuild, has likened it to resurrecting a Tyrannosaurus rex.
The Big Boy locomotives weighed more than one million pounds and were 132 feet, 9 inches long. Stood on its end, one would be the equivalent of a 13-story building. Each one cost approximately $265,000 to build, or about $4.4 million in today’s money. In the railroad world, the Big Boys were known as 4-8-8-4 articulated type locomotives. That designation meant the locomotive had four wheels in front, two sets of eight driving wheels (the large wheels connected to the pistons that make the locomotive move) in the middle, and four trailing wheels, all underneath one enormous boiler.
(Excerpt) Read more at atlasobscura.com ...
500+ tons!
Yeaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!!
Da-da-dada-daaaaaaaaaaaaa!
By the way, the Legacy Of The Beast Iron Maiden iPhone game is taking up much of my time since I discovered it two months ago.
Cheers, mate!
“Unless you are WALKING over the bridge and the train goes by——under the bridge.”
We did that when I was a kiddie. It was near a station and the trains would be starting up, belching mucho smoke. It was a thrill!
My favorite steam loco is the Yellowstone 2-8-8-4 that sits up in the Duluth, MN train museum. It’s just as big and powerful as the big boy, but it’s drivers are geared for low end pulling of 180 fully loaded ore cars from the iron range. It could probably only max out at 45mph where the big boy is a 65-75mph rocket.
Big Boy rolling (with help)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gAV31G60oo
Slightly smaller cousin under steam:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OgSNQOTw2U
From some of the R/R bridges I've seen ... rusted and seemingly poorly maintained ... the concentrated weight of these behemoths may well tax the infrastructure of many of the R/R lines.
4-8-8-4
Colossal, gargantuan and monstrous. Built for the mountains. Restoring a Big Boy is loyalty to American genius.
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To Read Later
It is not easy to replicate the older technology. These are complicated machines, with thousand of parts, and not all of the knowledge to build them was written down. The same issue happened with the Apollo program. In the 1980s NASA started wondering what it would take to restart building Apollo rockets if they wanted to get back to the moon. After research, the answer was that even though they saved all of the engineering drawings, so much knowledge is just in people’s heads that once the Apollo generation retired, it would be easier to just start over.
Big Boy-16 drivers and 4 cylinders.
The Challenger has 12 drivers and 4 cylinders.
The 844 has 8 drivers and two cylinders.
Problem is...the weight of the big boy, and challenger.
But, take a look at these.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhgHrDbN4EU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2BoMFZcnDI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV8rA3UE-lc
There is one of these in the Forney Transportation Museum in Denver. If you are ever in Denver, the entire museum is more than worth the price of admission. I work for Forney Industries (the foundation and my company were founded by the same man), and they gave us a dinner there once. It was amazing!
I remember 2 things...it was very big. There were finger bowls at the dining tables.
A friend of mine who passed away some time ago began his railroad career as a fireman on a Class 1 railroad as it was in the process of abandoning the steam engine. In his later career as an engineer, young crews who would complain in his presence about the lack of creature comforts in an aging diesel loco would always be told how it was still "like riding in a new Cadillac" compared to the best steam engine. Like most of us, he could put on rose-colored glasses when talking about the good old days, but while he claimed that he would gladly return to the right seat of an Alco RS-1 or EMD F7 locomotive in a heartbeat, those glasses weren't ever tinted enough to make him want to return to running a steam engine.
That being said, he did believe in the preservation of what steam engines had survived the cutting torch. If he were alive today and was invited to the footplate, I am pretty certain he would want to get into the left side and show the young guy how to do it "right"... least for a couple of miles.
This was the problem with steam. You reach a point where the mass required to contain the pressure outweighs the power it can produce. The Big Boy is certainly close to that point. What a machine though! Absolutely beautiful.
Bfl
Both the Challenger and the 4449 came over the Cajon Summit in the early 1990s. We chased the Challenger up to Newberry Springs, got ahead of it and waited for it to go by. It was an incredible experience.
Very cool! I know a guy with a large o gauge layout in his basement with one of these made by an American company called MTH. It looks and sounds amazing.
The pounding rhythm of the steam exhaust and the sheer mass of the locomotive hurtling along the track inspires such classics as "The City of New Orleans" and "The Wabash Cannonball".
The Illinois Central
Good morning America how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done
Wabash, St. Louis, & Pacific Railroad
From the great Atlantic ocean to the wide Pacific shore
She climbs a flowery mountains o'er the hills and by the shore
She's mighty tall and handsome she's known quite well by all
She's a regular combination on the Wabash Cannonball
Listen to the jingle, the rumble and the roar
As she glides along the woodland o'er the hills and by the shore
Hear the mighty rush of the engine hear those lonesome hoboes call
Traveling through the jungle on the Wabash Cannonball
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