Wednesday of last week, I read an email newsletter from a local business magazine publisher. It included an item that Union Pacific Big Boy #4014, the world’s largest operable steam locomotive and the sole trackworthy example of a special fleet of 25, would be making a Public Relations visit to the downtown rail yard over in the Major Metropolitan Area.
Readers should know that I, like most men of a “certain age” (generally between one and one hundred years) am absolutely fascinated by trains, for reasons I can’t explain briefly – something to do with romance and the idea of “freedom”, I suspect. (Or it was the Lionel set under my boyhood bed…) But there was little question that I was going to go see this. So I slung the Domke bag on my shoulder and left the editorial hovel early enough on Saturday morning to catch a train to see the train.
I’m familiar with local trains, after years with Metro Transit in H-Town, but I’d never ridden Tarrant County’s TexRail before.
I’m happy to report that the TexRail I caught was clean, comfortable, reasonably quiet, and on time, and dropped me off maybe half a mile from where I wanted to be… without ANY problems. I didn’t deal with traffic, I didn’t need to burn gas or waste time hunting for a parking place, I wasn’t charged outrageous parking fees. When I arrived I heard several of the other viewers at the exhibit comment that they’d walked farther from their cars to the train station than the walk from the train station to the display, and with that they’d been well and truly zapped on parking fees. (Ten and twenty bucks were both mentioned. The round trip fare on the train was five, gas was nil, and parking was free, so it was a clear win.)
Of course I stopped in at the Central Station terminal building to check it out. The styling has a distinctly “retro” ambience, but aside from collecting a dose of air conditioning and a handful of brochures for sites of potential The Other Texas interest, there was nothing to keep me there. After a couple of minutes, I went on my way, following a broken line of camera bags and slow-moving pedestrians until I got to the barricade around the Big Boy…
He’s well named. This is a truly ENORMOUS loco. A sign advised that he’s 133 feet from cow guard to the hitch on the back of the tender, holds 6100 gallons of fuel and 25,000 gallons of water, and weighs in at 1,200,000 pounds. Twenty-five Big Boys were built during World War II to pull equipment from Ogden, Utah to Cheyenne, Wyoming (4014’s current home) and back. He sports 16 drive wheels, each just under 6 feet across, and he’s 17 feet high. He’s so long, according to the sign, that the chassis is hinged so he can take curves.
I oohed and aahed and ogled for a while, then took about the only reasonable shot I could get, and decided that it was getting hot, the stormclouds were coming in and the crowd was starting to get uncomfortably large. Yes, we were outdoors and most were masked, but even so discretion seemed the better part of valor… that little virus is bigger and meaner than I am, and even though I’m fully vaccinated and doing all the “right” things, I KNOW when I’m out of my league. So I joined the outflow and wandered back to the TexRail terminal. Once there I stopped to admire and photograph an early city transit car on display. (Deluxe – fine wood and velvet seats, a far cry from modern plastic and vinyl, or even the nice acrylic coach seat I rode in on…)
And then it was time to walk up and down the platform and wait, briefly, to catch the TexRail back to base camp.
So there was a day of trains, and then there was THE train.
Majestic.