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Still time to see Big Boy.
World’s largest operating steam locomotive, for the record. It is on a coast-to-coast tour and July is nearly done. You can make it to Ohio. Indiana. Illinois. Missouri. Kansas. Colorado. Wyoming.
Miss it all? Watch online.
Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern tracks show up red. The path? Yellow. It shifts. Routes do that.
It started March 29. Cheyenne, Wyoming to the West Coast. Part of the US 250 birthday party. Then it went back east. Stops in California. Utah. New York. History repeating itself, mostly.
Philadelphia got the Fourth.
Fitting, right? That is where the Declaration was penned in 1776 so we are still here arguing about things.
Temperatures hit 102. Felt like 112. People sweated through it anyway. Thousands stood around the 133-footer, weighing in at 1.2 million pounds, just to watch steam pour out.
“This country was built on things like these,” a fan told NBC 10, presumably while wiping sweat from eyes that were full of admiration or tears or both. “And I think it’s fantastic… It’s been restored.”
Restored? Yes. No. 4014 is the last one running. There were 25 originally. Delivered starting in 1941 for the war effort to haul heavy gear. Now there are eight left sitting still. Only 4014 breathes fire.
The physics are interesting. The thing is too long to turn corners like a car. The frames are hinged. It bends. The wheels are a mess of numbers—4-8-8-8? No. 4-8-8-0? Also no. It is 4-8-8-6. Four leading wheels. Eight driving. Another eight driving. Four trailing.
Wait, let me check the article.
It says 4-8-8-. Hold on. Let us read again. Four pilot. Eight drivers. Extra set of eight. Four trailing. Okay. Four on the front to guide. Eight on the first engine block. Eight more on the second block. Four in back to keep the rear from dragging into the rails.
It used to haul 430 miles of freight between Ogden and Cheyenne in the mid-1900s. By the time 4014 quit in December 1962—wait, article says 1961? 1961. It covered over a million miles.
A total of 25 commissioned. Only one remains alive.
Do we miss that heat? Probably. Do we need to haul heavy equipment at 80 miles an hour through mountain curves using steam pressure? Debatable. But seeing it run before the summer ends.
Worth it.
Find your state on the yellow line.
Or just wait for next summer. It probably will not run.
