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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by garyaiki I pasted a whole paragraph from a website I found because it claimed a BigBoy "kept moving" a 10km long train. A claim no one in this thread has confirmed or denied. The rest of the paragraph was full of errors and it was a mistake to paste them. [/quote] I don't see any way that the UP could have kept a 10 Klick long train together. Contemporary to the Big Boy, the Reading had to remove the 4 unit FTs it was using on 100 car or less trains on the Catawissa grade in Pennsylvania because they kept pulling the drawbars out of the ends of the cars. The internal reports found that the 4 by 6 inch shanks on the couplers of the era were not capable of absorbing the stress of a long train being pulled up the grade and would snap when there was a change in tension. Now the FT was described by EMC as being the equivalent of a modern 4-8-4. The Big Boy is at least the equivalent of two 4-8-4s. So are you going to tell me that Union Pacific was able to defy the laws of physics and get metals to safely handle loads well in excess of their failure limits? A 1.0 km train i can believe even a 2.0 if the engineer was careful. But not a 10 km train with one locomotive on the head end.
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