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The Wyoming Division of the UP was and is a choke point for the railroad. Lines split off to the east and west but virtually everything goes through Wyoming. UP was a bridge route and traffic of all types went over the division in both directions. Sherman Hill on the east and the Wahsatch on the west are the major grades, but the saddle in the middle is roughly 350 miles with a 1% eastbound grade between Laramie and Sherman summit. Big Boys also worked the line down to Denver. The Big Boys can be thought of as Challengers on steroids, their drivers were only 1 inch smaller. Like the Allegheny and the A, they were designed to start heavy trains AND to get them over the road at reasonable speeds without tying up this criitical bottleneck. They along with the Challengers pulled general freight, refer trains, livestock trains, and even troop trains. Coal drags were generally handled by older rebuilt 2-8-8-0's and during the war by a group of 30 2-8-8-2's purchased from the C&O and 5 2-8-8-2's from N&W. The N&W compounds tied up the Sherman hill so bad, they were re-assigned to the coal mine branch lines around Rock Springs, where they worked succesfully doing what they were designed to do for many years, outlasting the C&O locos. Unlike the Allegheny's, Big Boys actually worked in the service they were designed for for many years and were doing so at the close of the steam era when Cheyene became almost a meca for steam fans. By then double headed Big Boys or occasionally a Big Boy double headed with a Gas Turbine thundering by was a memorable experience. The name Big Boy came from a worker at Alco. The trade press caught on, and railroad PR departments of that time were always looking for something to hype as the biggest, greatest, fastest, etc, plus I suspect a lot of these claims are a little like fish stories. It's interesting to sepculate how many cars a Big Boy could drag out of a yard or what a NP Yellowstone would do burning eastern coal, but neither was really designed or optimized for that service. One reason steam loco's lasted as long as they did on certain roads, was because the railroads owned the coal mines.
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