Category: Trains

Big Boy!

Maybe it’s a guy thing. For me, motorcycles and trains go together like coffee and a donut. There’s the obvious: The travel and adventure suggested by motorcycles and trains.  There’s the subtle: The mechanical beauty, be it a locomotive or a motorcycle. There’s the analogy, one I often use for a fast motorcycle: This thing pulls like a locomotive. It’s an expression that makes no sense, considering the leisurely acceleration of a locomotive compared to even a small motorcycle (in engineering terms, you just can’t defeat f = ma). I still use that expression, though. It conveys power, an attribute I apply to my motorcycles.

Like a lot of guys, I grew up in the Lionel era, dividing my drooling between things like the maroon Pennsylvania Railroad GG-1 locomotives that ran by our place and a variety of British vertical twins (all of which I knew had to pull, you know, like a locomotive).

I had lunch one day a few years ago with the guys at our local BMW dealership (I don’t own a BMW, but they let me hang around).  One of the boys was pumped because he had seen Big Boy at the Pomona Fairgrounds earlier. Only half-listening to the conversation, I thought he was talking about a hamburger, and then I realized it was a steam locomotive. My Lionel antenna immediately went up and like everyone else at the table, I started paying attention. To cut to the chase, we decided to visit Big Boy after our lunch that afternoon.

As you can see from the photo, luck was with us.  We had a great lunch and then we snuck into the Pomona fairgrounds to see Big Boy. I grabbed all of these photos with my iPhone. They would have been better if I had my Nikon, but you go to war with the army you have, and all I had was a phone.

I didn’t know really anything about the Big Boy locomotives, so when I got home I Googled it.  These locomotives, and 4014 in particular, have a fascinating story.  They are the largest and probably the most famous steam locomotives ever manufactured.  Old 4014 has been restored to operating condition by Union Pacific’s Heritage Fleet operation in Cheyenne, Wyoming (the photos you’re seeing here are before the restoration).  As part of the restoration, 4014 was converted to use fuel oil instead of coal for the boiler.   It was an obvious move.  I mean, where do you go to buy coal these days?

Only 25 Big Boys were ever built, and they all went to the Union Pacific Railroad.  They were manufactured by the American Locomotive Company in the early 1940s.   Their primary purpose was to pull long and heavy trains (up to 4,040 tons) through the Wasatch Mountains and the main rail lines between Ogden and Cheyenne.  They were designed for 80 mph, but 60 mph was their normal cruising speed. Big Boys produced 6000 horsepower and God only knows how much torque.  They were 132 long (including the tender) and they weighed 1.2 million pounds.  The tender could carry 24,000 gallons of water and 28 tons of coal.  The locomotive is articulated (it’s so long that the wheels are hinged and can turn with respect to each other to get through curves).  Old 4014 was first delivered to the Union Pacific in 1941 and retired in 1961, and during that period, it traveled over a million miles.

Very cool stuff, folks, made all the more interesting by the fact that No. 4014 finished its restoration in 2019 and entered service for special runs.   It would sure be cool to take a trip on one of those special runs.  That would be a real adventure.

More railroad posts?  Hey, take a look at these:

The Nevada Northern: It’s Worth a Trip To Ely
Golden Spike National Historic Park
A TT250 Ride

The Nevada Northern: It’s Worth a Trip To Ely

I last time I was in Ely, Nevada I was riding motorcycles with my Dad. I had a Honda XL600 and he was on a Suzuki 450 twin street bike. This must have been in the mid-1980’s because my XL600 was a 1983 model and the bike wasn’t that old at the time. We were traveling east on The Loneliest Highway, Nevada’s Route 50, and made a turn south onto, if not The Loneliest, a damn lonely Highway 93. In doing this we skirted Ely having never seen the main part of town or even realized it existed. The impression that there was nothing at Ely except a gas station and a sandblasted alien curio shop stuck with me for the next 35 years. Until I recently turned east off of Highway 50 onto 93 heading north: There was a whole town with streets and a downtown area! So not nothing after all.

Ely, Nevada has a cool, working train museum just a few blocks off the highway. Look, I love trains. I like riding on them. I like sitting nearby when they rip down the tracks at speed. I like waiting at crossing guards, how the train takes precedence. I like how engineers will still blow the whistle when you ride alongside on your motorcycle making that whistle-blowing arm motion. I like the wheels of the train flattening the pennies I put on the tracks. (If they don’t shake off.) I like riding motorcycles on old railroad right-of-ways and rotting black ties full of termites. I mean, my bathroom towel holders are bent railroad spikes, man. The older the train the better; steam trains are at the top of the list. You get dirty just looking at a steam engine. I like a train that sets fire to the countryside and consumes coal and water like a Saturn Five consumes rocket fuel. I guess I just like a train, you know?

Inside the Nevada Northern Railway yard you can wander through the old workshops where huge machinery worn smooth by decades of human interaction await the call. And the stuff still works! Lifetimes have been spent spinning these wheels. The day I visited the action was kind of slow, even the shop cat was nowhere to be found but I did see new bronze axle bearings waiting to be finished.

The star of any train museum is the Steam Engine. For all the reasons mentioned above. Imagine cross-country travel cut from 3 months to 3 days. Telegraph lines ran alongside railroad tracks sending messages thousands of miles at the speed of light. (minus a few relay stations) For their time and impact on society, these smoking water-spewing monsters make the Internet’s capabilities look like two rusty baked bean cans and a length of string.

Things used to be a lot snowier in the west, miles-long snow sheds were built in the Rockies and where the sheds petered out giant snow blowers cleared the tracks. This one looks to be in pretty good condition. I can spend hours poking around this place daydreaming about being alive in that era. Maybe I could have been the one spinning those wheels or repairing leaking heat exchangers.

Check in with the Nevada Northern (https://www.nnry.com) and be sure to get a ride on the old trains. They still operate on a schedule, just not when I was there. There’s a gift shop full of cool train-a-phernalia and cold drinks. I walked for hours but I’ll be going back to Ely again. I want to ride!

Want more railroad stuff?  Hey, here’s a great railroad story about Old No. 463.  How about the Chattanooga Choo Choo? And another one about Golden Spike National Historic Site.  We’ve got two more train stories coming up real soon about the railroad museum in Sacramento and Big Boy (Ol’ No. 4014), too, so stay tuned!

The Chattanooga Choo Choo, Chickamauga, Chicken Shawerma, and more…

I’ve blown by Chattanooga a bunch of times on Interstate 24 and I’ve seen the sign for the Chattanooga Choo Choo.  I always wanted to stop to see it.  But I never had.  Until today, that is.  Yep, there really is such a thing…

The real deal: The Chattanooga Choo Choo. It’s on display behind a hotel of the same name, just a hop, skip, and a jump from the Interstate and downtown Chattanooga’s other attractions.

This is my first visit to this fine southern city, and folks, I’m here to tell you:  Chattanooga is a fabulous town.  I had no idea.  This is a wonderful place, nestled along the Tennessee River close to the Georgia border.   The Chattanooga Choo Choo.  Lookout Mountain and Ruby Falls.  Moon Pies (yep, for real).   Great walking paths.  Nearby Chickamauga Battlefield National Park.  An incredible Civil War rifle collection.  Dining that makes the word “fabulous” seem wholly inadequate.  The verdict is in: I like this place!

So, what’s the deal with Moon Pies?  Hey, if you’ve never heard of Moon Pies, you need to get out more often.   And if you’ve never tasted one, well, trust me on this:   You owe yourself this treat.  It turns out that Chattanooga is where Moon Pies are made, you can get them in just about any local store, and there’s actually an official Moon Pie factory outlet in downtown Chattanooga.  That fact, all by itself, makes Chattanooga a bucket list destination!

Chattanooga: Home of the Moon Pie.
Heaven in multipack cartons. We bought several to bring home.
And we sampled a few, too. That other treat? That’s a Goo Goo, another local treat made in nearby Nashville, but that’s a story for another blog.

Lookout Mountain is another cool spot in Chattanooga, with an underground cave system that actually includes a 140-foot waterfall (all of which is underground).  Think Jules Verne and a journey to the center of the earth.  Yep, we hit it, too!

Deep in Lookout Mountain, headed for Ruby Falls.
Imagine what it must have been like to discover this while exploring an underground cave. Meet Ruby Falls, 140-ft tall, and all underground.

We had an incredible lunch at The 405, a place we just happened upon while walking around downtown.  The 405 is a Middle Eastern restaurant (I love Middle Eastern food) and it’s another one of Chattanooga’s best kept secrets.  I had a chicken shawerma sandwich and it was fabulous, with juicy roasted chicken, a perfect Tahini sauce, and pita bread made fresh on the premises.  I told our waitress I write a blog for the most discerning riders on the planet (that would be you), and the owner was at my table in a heartbeat.  It turns out that my new good buddy and restauranteur Rashad is one of us.  He rides a BMW sport bike, and we had a conversation about the great roads in the Chattanooga area.   Rashad told me you can ride 51 weeks out of the year in and around Chattanooga and the way he described the roads, this sounds like a place where I need to spend more time.  From my explorations around this region, I believe him.  I have to get back here.  And when you get out here, you have to try The 405.  Tell Rashad Joe sent you.

From downtown, it was a short ride to the Chickamauga and Chattahoochee National Military Park.   We were lucky.   It was Veteran’s Day, and the National Park Service was giving free guided tours.  I think they do that every day, but seeing this sacred place on this grand holiday (on the 100th Anniversary of the end of World War I) made it even more interesting.  Our guide was another new good buddy, in this case Ranger Chris.

Good buddy Ranger Chris on the Chickamauga battlefield.

Chris led a motor tour to three stops on the Chickamauga battlefield, and he made it come alive for us.  If you’ve never been to Chickamauga, my advice is to put it on your list.  Chickamauga and Gettysburg (fought just a few days apart) marked the turning point of the Civil War.   We thoroughly enjoyed Chris’ presentation and the tour.

One of the best parts of the Chickamauga stop was the visitor’s center.  It has several cannon on display, and a large map showing the battlefield.

Chris’s materials and his Ranger campaign hat. Good stuff at the Chickamauga visitor center.
The business end of one of many cannon on display at the Chickamauga site.

The Chickamauga visitor center also houses one of the best (probably the best) collection of Civil War rifles I’ve ever seen.   It seems a local engineer and gun collector named Claud Fuller had built a collection of some 5,000 firearms and he donated a portion of his collection for permanent display here.   They are magnificent.  This collection, all by itself, justifies a trip to the area.

One of several halls displaying Civil War rifles from the Fuller collection.
Fiddleback maple on a black powder rifle. These are beautiful firearms.
A presentation-grade Spencer. I could have spent all day just looking at these rifles.
Color case hardening on a Remington Hepburn rifle. This is amazing work.
Several Trapdoor Springfields on display. These fire the 45 70 cartridge, one of the all time greats. The second one from the right is an Officer’s Model Trapdoor Springfield. I had never seen one before. I would have joined the Army just to get one of these!

After spending the afternoon at Chickamauga, we had dinner at the 1885 restaurant in Chattanooga’s St. Elmo district.  I saw something on the menu I had never seen before:  Mushrooms and grits.  Hmmm, I wondered.  That sounded interesting.  And wow, was it ever!

Well, kiss my grits! This is before…
…and this is after. Yep, it was that good!

After dinner, our waitress recommended the cheese cake.  Hey, everything else had been amazing, so why not?

Lemon and cream cheesecake. It came with a discount coupon for the local Coronary Care Unit.

My dinner tonight was one of the finest I’ve ever enjoyed.  It was a great way to finish a Chattanooga visit.  I’m up for a summer ride in this area, and I’ll be back.   We’ll be home in California by the time you read this, and we’ll have a supply of Moon Pies for a short while.  Like my good buddy Reuben always says:  What a life!

Going Nowhere, Slowly

Four-Sixty-Three!

A gentle rain of cinders descends upon passengers in the open-air cattle car. Shifting side to side, now a hard lurch, has you reaching, drunk-walking to the beat. People sway in time to the rails and the rails play a tune older than wax-cylinder recordings. Engine Number Four-Sixty-Three chuffs black, riot-grade smoke as the tracks gradually rise into the tailings of the Rocky Mountains in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado.

It’s beautiful, isn’t it?

Fire is the driving force behind the Cumbres & Toltec line. The tender hitched to Four-Sixty-Three glistens with dark, crumbling coal trailing a peat-tane scent. This is the good stuff, before coal became clean and beautiful. The tracks steepen; Four-Sixty-Three’s breathing becomes labored. The chuffs are farther apart in time but not distance. The fireman shovels more coal into the boiler. Steam pressure rises, pile it on man, let’s get this iron horse moving.

Tenderly stoking the fire…
I think I can…I think I can…
Adding new meaning to bore and stroke.

We climb higher, waxy shrubs and rabbits give way to deer and pines. The air cools and each sigh from Four-Sixty-Three’s smokestack hangs in the air marking the exact spot it escaped the inferno. The little train spews water vapor from several ports. It drools water near the drive wheels, jowly and unpettable. Geysers of high pressure water shoot out the side of the engine at random, but no doubt necessary, intervals.

We left Antonito, Colorado three hours, twenty-five miles, and thousands of gallons of water ago. The scenery is aboriginal: landslides, mountain streams, hard cuts through solid rock and lonely cabins pressed to the ground. We are burning our way across eons of metamorphic western land.

Great rides on great rails…
A magic ride through amazing lands…

The Cumbres & Toltec stops for lunch midway between Antonito and Chama. Of the two options, I pick meatloaf because turkey is for Thanksgiving. It’s an assembly line operation but the food is tasty, old style and all you can eat. Fitting for a vintage steam train ride.

Water pours out onto the ground. Between the elbow of the tower and the chute there’s a 6-inch gap. Four-Sixty-Three guzzles the water as fast as it can flow into the boiler. The steam whistle blows twice and steam-torque pulls us away from the feed bag higher into the mountains where the spruce trees are dying from beetles and fungus.

The line into Chama is bumpy and downhill. In places Highway 17 parallels the railroad track. Old men stop their cars to photograph Four-Sixty-Three comin’ round the bend. The whistle blows and camera shutters release to freeze a moment from the past today. Four-Sixty-Three pulls into Chama a half-hour late. Missing the schedule is death to a train man. They apologize and ask forgiveness.

For people not staying in Chama a modern motor coach whisks passengers back to Antonio in one hour. The same voyage that took us nine hours by train. I feel sorry for those poor people, they’ll never get that hour back.