Union Pacific’s Big Boy 4014 won’t make any long cross-country trips or excursions out West this summer, but that doesn’t mean nothing special isn't planned.
The world’s largest operating steam engine has a date with a recently unveiled, cherry red locomotive that honors Abraham Lincoln. The No. 1616 is a diesel locomotive that would more normally be painted yellow.
It has a new color scheme now, one that borrows from the colors of Lincoln’s era to highlight the role the nation’s 16th president played in building the transcontinental railroad from 1862 to 1869.
Big Boy will make two whistle-stops in Greeley, Colorado, for a double date with No. 1616, one from 11:30 a.m. to noon on July 17, and the other from 8:30 to 8:50 a.m. on July 19.
It will spend July 18 in Denver, but no public access is planned on that date.
The Big Boy locomotive departs Cheyenne at 10 a.m. July 17 for Greeley and will return to Cheyenne from Greeley at 10:30 a.m. July 19. While no public access is planned in Cheyenne, the public can still watch the train depart and/or arrive in Cheyenne, occasions that typically draw large crowds.
Four exclusive cab rides will be auctioned for rides on Big Boy between Cheyenne and Denver, with proceeds going to the Union Pacific Museum Association.
The 21-day auction, which begins June 2, will accept bids for a July 17 ride, which the auction notice says is part of Big Boy’s Cheyenne Frontier Days preparations.
The rides are about two hours long, and riders must be at least 18 years of age, able to stand for most if not all of the trip and withstand high temperature inside the steam engine cab — up to 140 degrees or higher.
What Does It Take To Build A Railroad?
America had been dreaming of a transcontinental railroad as early as 1832, the same year Western Emigrant newspaper editor Samuel Dexter penned an op-ed about the idea.
“It is in our power,” he said then, “to open an immense interior country to market, to unite our eastern and western shores firmly together.”
It would take another 40 years, however, to realize that vision. In the summer of 1860, West Coast-based designer and railway builder Theodore Judah picked a route through the wilderness and over the Sierra Nevada Mountains at the Donner Pass.
The race, however, didn’t begin in earnest until 1862, when Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act. In that legislation, Congress pitted two railway companies against each other, the Central Pacific Railroad from the west and the Union Pacific from the east.
Each company was to meet somewhere in the middle of the country, and each would be paid according to the number of miles of track their own company laid. That created a powerful incentive to build faster than their competitor, over the 1,912 miles of rough, dangerous, undeveloped terrain.
For Central Pacific’s part, their route meant blasting 15 tunnels through the dense granite cliffs of the Sierra Nevada mountains. They employed thousands of Chinese workers for the endeavor, who used hand drills as well as an intriguing — but dangerous — new invention called nitroglycerin.
Union Pacific, on the other hand, had to cross the high plains, braving blizzards, deserts, and raids by displaced Native Americans, who feared what the arrival of the “Iron Horse” would mean for their people.
Boomtowns sprung up along the route as Union Pacific worked, towns that quickly earned the nickname, “Hell on Wheels,” a moniker first used by Massachusetts newspaper editor named Samuel Bowles.
“At North Platte, they were having a good time gambling, drinking and shooting each other,” the editor wrote in his description of a “Hell on Wheels” town in Nebraska.
High rates of crime, as well as prostitution and gambling, characterized these pop-up railroad towns. There was no real order to them, just a hodgepodge collection of businessmen, with varying scruples, hoping to make fast money for as little work as possible.
Many of these Hell on Wheels towns were fleeting, evaporating almost as quickly as they’d appeared, when railroad crews inevitably moved on down the line for the next section of track.
“Julesburg is now an overdone town, a played-out place,” wrote journalist Henry Morgan Stanley. “It is now about to be abandoned by the transit sojourners, and many of them are shifting their portable shanties to some prospective city west — Cheyenne, or some ‘prairie dog town,’ where cash can be made without work.”
Magic City Of The Plains
Stanley clearly didn’t think much of Cheyenne’s chances, but right from the start, a populace gathered who felt the town had a different feel, a more permanent feel. And people laid bets on that by ordering houses to stand up on what would eventually come to be known as the “Magic City of the Plains.”
“Houses came by the hundreds from Chicago, readymade,” wrote an astonished French tourist named Louise Laurent Simonin in 1867. “In Chicago, they make houses to order, as in Paris they make clothes to order.”
Other pre-existing structures came in from Julesburg, the previous end-of-track headquarters. Among them was one that would become the shoe store of prominent merchant Stephen Bon for at least a decade.
“Everywhere I hear the noise of the saw and the hammer,” Simonin wrote. “Everywhere wooden houses are going up; everywhere streets are being laid out.”
Some of those houses traveled down the streets with their occupants still inside.
“You can see the sheet-iron chimney smoking while the houses move along,” Simonin wrote.
Among the structures built during this time was the Rollins House, which served as Wyoming’s unofficial capitol while the actual Capitol was completed.
Even after that, many lawmakers stayed there or used it for their offices.
A Shotgun Wedding Of The Rails
Union Pacific didn’t stay in Cheyenne for long. It couldn’t afford to. It pulled up stakes by 1868, barely a year after arriving, heading to the next end-of-track town, present-day Laramie, on its way to destiny. A shotgun wedding of the rails that would take place in Promontory, Utah in 1869.
For the occasion, Central Pacific sent a train called Jupiter, carrying a passenger train for its president Leland Stanford.
Jupiter had originally chosen a different train, called the Antelope, for his trip to Promontory Summit. But workmen, who were clearing a large mountain cut, failed to notice the small green flag flying from behind the first locomotive that indicated another train followed close behind.
As soon as the first train passed, they rolled a huge log down the cut. Right as Stanford’s Special and the Antelope were passing by. That damaged the Antelope so badly, Stanford had to write ahead and ask the next station to hold the train just ahead of them. That train was the Jupiter.
Union Pacific, meanwhile, had locomotives No. 116, 117, 118, 119, and 120 ready for service. Like Stanford, Union Pacific VP Thomas Durant chose a different train than the one that ultimately made it to Promontory, Utah.
In Durant’s case, he was forced onto a siding and stopped at the tiny town of Piedmont, Wyoming near the Utah border where 400 laid-off tie cutters were a bit miffed that they were still waiting for their pay three months later.
They chained Durant’s coach to the siding, insisting upon their pay before they’d let him go.
It took two days for the wages to arrive, a delay that shifted the date of the spike ceremony from May 8 to May 10.
More Misfortune Ahead
Durant’s misfortune didn’t end there, however.
The rain-swollen Weber River was on the rise and, when the Durant Special reached the river at Devil’s Gate Bridge, the alert engineer spotted that some of the bridge supports had been lost.
That made the bridge unsafe for the heavy engine, so he refused to cross. The coaches, being lighter in weight, could be pushed across the bridge. That left Durant without a locomotive for the ceremonious occasion.
He wired a message to Ogden, where the other locomotives sat.
No. 119 was next to the main line and, thus, found a special place in American history.
Despite their priceless place in history, both the Jupiter and No. 119 were ultimately scrapped. The Jupiter’s last engineer did try to save it but failed. It and No. 119 each earned a scrap fee of around $1,000.
Eventually, Jupiter and No. 119 were reproduced by a California engineering company, O’Connor Engineering Laboratories, using an 1870 engineer’s handbook and enlarged photos of the two locomotives.
The replicas now sit at Promontory Summit in Utah, where they were brought in 1979 for the 110th anniversary of the Golden Spike Ceremony.
The color scheme for Union Pacific’s No. 1616 borrows from the colors of Locomotive No. 119. The plan is for it to serve as a traveling ambassador.
Its first public stop was May 10 at the Oregon Rail Heritage Center in Portland, Oregon, to celebrate National Train Day. Union Pacific has not released a complete schedule for the Abraham Lincoln train yet. It will be announced at UP.com when available.
Big Boy won’t have a summer tour schedule this year, but a big year is being planned for 2026, the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
