Hundreds from around the state and the world stopped their cars and lined the Union Pacific Railroad tracks from Morgan to Echo April 20 to glimpse a steel fossil roll back to life.
At 133 feet long and weighing 1.2 million pounds, Big Boy 4014 is the world’s largest operational steam engine.
It arrived in Echo Junction shortly before 11 a.m. and drew a crowd of both the nerdy and the curious.
“I find anything historical and unique very interesting, so I want to have that be a part of my life. I don't want to let it go by without seeing it,” Summit Park-area resident Wendy Westerfeld said. “To me, it's important and it's fun.”
Union Pacific says it commissioned 25 Big Boys starting in the 1940s, but only eight survive today. Big Boy 4014 returned to service, burning oil instead of coal, for the transcontinental railroad’s 150th anniversary seven years ago.
The Big Boys were designed to move World War II equipment and other large loads between Ogden, Utah, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. That’s where 4014 was headed.
“It was a day where we all came together to think about history and to appreciate all the rail workers that gave their lives to giving us a way to come together: the Chinese rail workers, the Irish rail workers,” Kimball Junction resident Angela Hill said. “So much of our society and our character is within the railroad.”
Hill, like Westerfeld, was following the Big Boy along its route. She was headed to to see it in Evanston, Wyoming, after Echo. Westerfeld had just seen it in Morgan.
Pausing for a half hour in the historic Morgan Station before a crowd of veterans, families and school children, 4014 didn’t so much whistle as it roared.
While the country celebrates its 250th birthday, Morgan Station is celebrating its 100th. Station historian Tyler Clark says the railroad helped the city recover from a plague of grasshoppers in the late 1860s.
“A lot of the businesses that used to be in the center of town moved up to here [the station] and built up Commercial Street,” Clark told KPCW. “Ever since then, the railroad has kind of really transformed Morgan from a farming town to a railroad town.”
Back outside, a Frenchman in a cowboy hat named Thierry Lavigne was celebrating American independence and preaching the benefits of train travel.
“I'm part of a committee that tried to promote putting back travel trains for Americans in the U.S. — Europe has a wonderful, huge network,” Lavigne said. “It's time to put Americans back on high-speed trains.”
Lavigne also said he was there to honor the French-American military alliance that helped win the Revolutionary War and later World War II. He handed out small American flags for spectators to wave as Big Boy 4014 rolled out for Wyoming.
It was scheduled to reach Cheyenne April 24 and will begin the eastern leg of its cross-country journey in May.
