I should add a description of the link I just posted: They’re rebuilding “Big Boy” for the 150th anniversary of the Golden Spike. It will run from it’s rebuilding site to Ogden sometime soon.
Good stuff. Over an hour is more than I can sit through, though. I was hoping for more of the big drivers running the rails in the US in the forties.
Thanks for the link to the story about rebuilding “Big Boy.”
Found this humous: “the steam engines were originally going to be named “Wasatch,” after the mountains they were built to carry freight over, but in 1941, an American Locomotive Company shop worker wrote “Big Boy” in chalk on the front of the locomotive and the name stuck.”
Compare that to Elon Musk’s “BFR” which was recently rechristened to “Big Falcon Rocket” — but we all know what he was implying with the original “BFR.”
A far cry from the innocent “Big Boy” era.
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Trains Magazine and Special Interest Tours will offer a multi-day Big Boy No. 4014 chase bus on the Union Pacific locomotive’s inaugural run in May 2019, promoters said Friday.
The massive 4-8-8-4 will operate from its homebase and restoration shop in Cheyenne to Ogden, Utah, in early May as part of events marking the 150th anniversary of the first Transcontinental Railroad. A Big Boy steam locomotive has not run under its own power since 1959.
Expectations are that large numbers of spectators from around the globe will travel to Wyoming and Utah to witness this once-in-a-lifetime move of one of the world’s largest and most powerful steam locomotives ever built. The route is native to the Big Boy locomotives, and includes legendary Sherman Hill, spectacular Echo Canyon, and Wasatch grade.