Big Boy 4014 Gets Huge Welcome As It Chugs Home To Cheyenne Depot

CHEYENNE — The fans come out of the woodwork when Big Boy 4014, the world’s grandest and largest operable steam engine, chugs into his home station.

Those who love the Big Boy locomotive aren’t just from Cheyenne. They come from Colorado, Nebraska and around the region — some even interrupting vacation plans to see Big Boy in action.

There was also someone who was there only in spirit this time as the famous engine came home Friday evening.

Kirk Weilepp died earlier this year from pancreatic cancer, but he was a huge train buff throughout his lifetime, chasing all kinds of trains. Big Boy was in his top three.

On Friday, friends Sue Connelly and Cimarron Jeremiah had a life-size photo of Weilepp’s head and shoulders set up on the fence just outside the railroad tracks in Cheyenne, a bit away from the madding crowds. The spot overlooked the tracks where Big Boy would pull up to the Cheyenne Depot.

“We wanted to do this a little away from everyone,” Connelly explained. “This is how we’re paying tribute back to him for our passion and his passion.”

She and Jeremiah sat on top of their vehicle, waving “thank you” signs for their friend, while taking video of Big Boy approaching the photographic cutout they’d attached to the fence.

During his lifetime, Weilepp counted touring the Union Pacific Steam Shop in Cheyenne as one of the big highlights of his life. He was given a commemorative stay bolt from when Big Boy was being restored, Connelly told Cowboy State Daily.

She and Jeremiah are taking Weilepp’s ashes on a journey around the country, chasing trains with their friend one last time, and releasing some of the ashes at locations related to trains, as he’d requested.

“I’ll also be taking some of his ashes with me to Boston,” Connelly said. “So, he’ll get one last train ride.”

That one won’t be a Big Boy run, Connelly said.

“It will be an Amtrak,” she said. “Just a regular train. He’d taken some rides on an Amtrak and enjoyed it. He loved trains of any kind.”

It’s The Thunder And The Fury

Connelly and her husband own a sign company, which is how they met Weilepp, but Connelly is also a mechanic.

“I love the Big Boy,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “Just to hear it, to be near it — I’ve been a mechanic most of my life, so I know some of the ins and outs of how it’s put together and how they redid some of the machining just to be able to restore and run it.”

Big Boy and it’s classic steam whistle can be heard from quite a distance away, but when it arrives, everyone knows it. There’s thunder and there’s fury — so much sound it feels like ear drums are about to explode.

Heat pours off the machine, too, which weighs more than 1 million pounds, and that heat can be felt from feet away.

The train is tall, hard to capture in a single frame at 16 feet and some change. It’s also long at more than 132 feet, and it's 11 feet wide. Big Boys were made as tall and as wide as bridges and tunnels would allow, and their length was constrained by the curves of the tracks they had to navigate.

It’s their sheer size, though, that gives them the raw power that so enamors Big Boy fans like Scott Casner.

The Cheyenne resident was in second grade when his father took him to watch one of the other Big Boy engines, 4004, roll into Holliday Park in Cheyenne.

“My dad told me, ‘You’ll never see this one move again,’” Casner recalled.

But then one day on his lunch hour, he found himself all jammed up by traffic near the Cheyenne Depot.

“I was like, ‘What the heck is going on here?’” he said. “And then I saw they were wheeling 4014 back into town that day.”

So, late lunch or no, Casner stopped to watch them wheeling Big Boy back into town. He wasn’t going to miss one of the Big Boys moving again.

Later he would learn that the train was to be restored. It was going to move again on its own power.

“I’ve got videos of when they pulled it out of here after they restored it,” he said, proudly.

In fact, he makes sure to watch any time Big Boy rolls in or out of Cheyenne and gets new videos.

“The thing that kills me is the sound,” he said. “That ‘hooh, hooh, hooh,’ I just love the noise. And the power … All of it is created by nothing more than steam. How do they do that? I don’t know, but it’s fascinating.”

200,000 Guests, $3 Million-Plus Impact

Big Boy is returning to its home base in Cheyenne for about a month after its summer tour of Utah, Nevada, California and Idaho, Union Pacific spokeswoman Kristen South told Cowboy State Daily.

“We estimate that more than 200,000 people came and saw the locomotive on this tour, which is amazing,” she said. “The point of all this is for people to understand not only the history of rail, but to really think about the future of rail and how it moves everything that is in our lives.”

The city of Rosalind, California, reported a $3 million bump in economic impact from tourists coming to see Big Boy while it was stationed there, attesting to the power of the almost cult-like fandom that surrounds the train, the last operable Big Boy steam engine.

Twenty-five Big Boys were built during World War II to take heavy loads to the West Coast. There’s a lot of mountainous terrain between Ogden, Utah, and Evanston, Wyoming, and it takes a really big, heavy train to carry the kind of huge loads the war effort was going to need.

Big Boy 4014 was the third engine of the last Big Boy run in 1959, and was eventually sent to a museum in California, until Union Pacific decided to restore the train for the 2019 150th Golden Spike celebration commemorating the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railroad.

After resting in the shop for about a month, Big Boy will be heading back out again for its eight-week Heart of America tour, hitting Chicago first and then wrapping around down into Texas.

“This is the most touring we’ve done since 2019, when we restored the locomotive for the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad’s completion,” she said. “It’s great to have it back out and see people again, and all the excitement.”

UP’s New President Also On Tour With Big Boy

Employees with Union Pacific are sometimes singled out for a tour with Big Boy for meritorious performance, so there were several of those on board Friday.

Dignitaries, like the mayors of cities Big Boy is passing through, are also sometimes invited on board for a short trip on the train.

Union Pacific’s new president, Beth Whited, was among UP officials on hand for the pit stop in Cheyenne.

“It’s always exciting to come in or go out from Cheyenne,” she said. “The whole town turns out. Wyoming loves their railroad, and we love that Big Boy’s home is here.”

Whited is Union Pacific’s first female president. She told Cowboy State Daily she's focused on a new strategy for Union Pacific, which faces significant challenges to its future.

For one, coal cars have been waning, she said. But the company has been successfully finding replacements for that revenue.

“What we’re seeing is trucks coming off the highway onto the railroad and that intermodal service,” she said. “We’ve had a great year replacing coal this year. I always tell people anything that you have at your house or that you drive or that you want to buy, probably moved by rail either as a raw product or an intermediate product or a finished product.”

Many people don’t realize the connection that still exists between the railroad and the economy, she added, but railroad continues to be one of the most cost-effective ways to move goods and commodities in bulk.

“We’re really excited about all the ways we can improve our service and get better operationally and from a safety perspective,” she said. “And then grow on top of that. We’ve been here for 165-plus years, and we’re going to be here for another 165.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.