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 ...
Loving it.
The sheer size and mass of these engines is nothing short of astounding. The Big Boys were approximately 1.2 million pounds. There are a lot of YouTube videos on the rebuilding effort for these engines, or I should say the one or two of them where one can even imagine rebuilding them to functioning state. There are zillions of Parts, none of which fit anything else in the known universe. They all have to be custom-made and custom machined. For one who wants to see an engine of this size barreling across the Nebraska Plains you can Google up3985. That is a very slightly smaller engine, known as The Challenger. Also operated by Union Pacific there are some videos of this thing running at 75 and 85 miles per hour over the Nebraska Plains and it is simply awesome.
Bruce Dickinson is going to like that.
I lived near steam trains——they were filthy things and I do not have any pleasant memories about them.
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A little sootier but out in the countryside, no problem...
There is no question that the reality of being near these things is a lot less romantic than watching the thing Barrel across the plains at high speed.
I’m nothing close to a train guy, but this locomotive is f-ing GIGANTIC!
(133 feet long, 500 tons)
Choo Choo Ping! :-)
“But in 2013, Union Pacific announced that it was reacquiring a Big Boy in hopes of restoring it for the 150th anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. “
Absolutely NO ECONOMIC REASON for a private corporation to do this (very expensive project)...
...which is why this move is so AWESOME!
To put 1,200,000 pounds in perspective.... that’s 8 1/3 Abrams main battle tanks.
They are great when you only see them for a minute or two when they roar by at speed.
Bookmark. I love these big engines.
I’ve chased a lot of steam, 2472, 4449, 844,N&W 611 and the Challenger who’s number escapes me at the moment. This is fun stuff.
My grandparents lived in a B&O Rail Road town. I can remember steam engines going by the house. They had a picture of FDR on a wall upstairs. The clean wallpaper that was exposed was a revelation. The soot permeated everything so that you really didn’t notice.
“They are great when you only see them for a minute or two when they roar by at speed.”
Unless you are WALKING over the bridge and the train goes by——under the bridge.
Dreadful.
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Dagny Taggart Special
I was just up there last month touring their shop. Thank God the CEO likes steam locomotives.
“...which is why this move is so AWESOME!”
In their shop they have the last steam locomotive that they bought and use it to haul the CEO and board around.
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