Big Boy No. 4005 shines inside the Forney Transportation Museum in Denver, Colo. Jim Wrinn photo.
I trekked west recently for the Rocky Mountain Railroad Club’s 75th annual banquet and also to get in touch with Union Pacific’s Big Boy steam locomotives. With all of the excitement related to UP bringing back Big Boy No. 4014 that’s currently on display in southern California, I figured it was time to go where the Big Boys once roamed.
The club met, appropriately, in the former UP freight house in downtown Denver, now the Denver Chophouse & Brewery, just down the block from Denver Union Station. I was the guest speaker, and enjoyed the fellowship of more than 150 railroad enthusiasts.
The backhead of Big Boy No. 4005 shows a complete locomotive with the key valves and controls labeled. Jim Wrinn photo.
A few blocks away is the Forney Museum of Transportation, where UP 4-8-8-4 No. 4005 is safely tucked inside a building, away from the elements. Her paint job isn’t the best (it shows signs of a hasty bush job with lots of heavy runs), but her cab is accessible to a point and the myriad of parts on the backhead are labeled, from the air brakes to the water glasses. The front end of the locomotive is downright shiny.
The letters and numbers on the front number plate are burnished to a silvery polish, and the markers are lit green as if the engine is ready to pull the first section of a freight across Wyoming’s Sherman Hill to Ogden, Utah. Because it’s wedged in tight in the building, you’ll find it impossible to get a good photo of the entire locomotive, but you can come close. Just bring a super wide-angle lens.
Big Boy No. 4004 is at home in Holiday Park in Cheyenne, Wyo., one of the key terminals on the transcontinental railroad for these locomotives. Jim Wrinn photo.
From Denver, it’s a 90-minute trek up Interstate 25 to Cheyenne, Wyo., where UP’s 25 Big Boys lived and worked between 1941 and 1959. Within flange squealing distance of the busy UP yard is Holiday Park, home to Alco-built Big Boy No. 4004. The engine is well painted and illuminated at night, but still looks as if she would appreciate a roof over her head. The front number plate is a facsimile, and she’s surrounded by a chainlink fence, but there’s good signage to remind folks why the locomotive is here and the role it played in the local economy as well as the transportation system of a nation at war and in the years after until the diesels came marching in.
Union Pacific No. 4004 is safe behind a fence, but the front number plate is a fascimile and the headlight is covered over. Jim Wrinn photo.
The true place to channel the heart and spirit of the Big Boy locomotives is atop nearby Sherman Hill, where the UP has three main lines to carry its tonnage between East and West. You can see much of this railroad from Otto Road, I-80, and a smattering of public paved and dirt roads, but it’s difficult to see key parts of the line because so much of the property belongs to private owners, either the railroad or ranchers. I was fortunate: A good friend knows the ranch owners whose property overlooks busy Dale Junction, where the three mainlines across the hill come together to pierce the twin Hermosa Tunnels. We watched trains here for a few hours here, witnessing, among other sights, a triple meet involving the three of the big commodities of this age: Autos, intermodal, and oil. We also got a treat by seeing the 5,000th GE Evolution series locomotive leading an eastbound train. In all, we witnessed or counted more than 30 trains from sun up to sun down. From locals to manifests to unit trains, it was not hard to see why that 70 years ago such a massive locomotive was needed here: the tonnages are incredible and the grades are many. While diesels growl their way across Sherman Hill today, the Big Boys dug in and steamed mightily to move freight.
A triple meet on the Union Pacific at Dale Junction, Wyo., as an eastbound auto rack train meets a westbound intermodal and a merchandise train pauses on Track 3, waiting for track time. Jim Wrinn photo.
The Big Boys may be long gone from this hallowed shrine of American railroading, a sacred place on the nation’s first transcontinental railroad. But they’ve left their mark.
Looking down at the ground on the ranchland that overlooks the Hermosa Tunnels, one of my colleagues pointed out the cinders; they had been put there on the ground more than 50 years ago before the last Big Boy pulled a train here.
An eastbound Union Pacific train with UP ES44AC No. 7964, the 5,000th General Electric Evolution series locomotive, on the point, rolls through Dale Junction, Wyo. Jim Wrinn photo.
The Big Boy survivors in Denver, Cheyenne, and elsewhere bear silent testimony to their labors. If you listen carefully enough on Sherman Hill, though, you can still hear them working their way up one hill after another as Alco and UP intended.
Be sure to check out more Trains coverage of Union Pacific Big Boys and learn more about No. 4014 on the road to restoration at www.TrainsMag.com/BigBoy.
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