88-Year-Old Cheyenne Railroad Veteran Donates Entire Railroading Collection To UW

The smoke belching out of steam locomotives, the depots, water towers and tracks leading to new places always beckoned Jim Ehernberger.

The 88-year-old Cheyenne railroad enthusiast, author, photographer and source for knowledge about Wyoming railroads remembers living for a time as a young boy in Bushnell, Nebraska, and going down to the depot where the agent treated him kindly.

At 15, three years after his family moved to Cheyenne, he recalls going on an excursion ride with the Rocky Mountain Railroad Club out of Denver over Sherman Hill in May 1953.

There were several people with cameras onboard that interested the teen. He got into a conversation with a man who held one and offered to sell it.

“He was a yard master, and he asked me when I would be 16,” Ehernberger recalled. “I said, well July 22 is my birthday, and I’ll be 16. … He said, ‘If I get you a job on the railroad would you buy my camera?’ I said, ‘Sure.’”

And so began a 35-year career with the Union Pacific Railroad and a photography passion that stretched into adulthood that has resulted in thousands of photos of steam locomotives, trains, depots, and evolved into writing and publishing books and magazine articles related to railroading in the West.

Ehernberger has authored more than 50 books such as “Union Pacific’s Cheyenne Facilities 1868 - 2015,” “Union Pacific Nebraska Depots,” “Smoke Down the Canyons” on the Idaho Union Pacific Division, and much more.

He has also collected thousands of books and articles on railroading that are in the process of being transferred to the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center.

‘Invaluable’ Donation

Ehernberger’s collection of railroad schedules, thousands of other documents and artifacts, along with his photography of the last days of the great steam era as a teen also have found their way to the center.

American Heritage Center Historian Kail Moede said Ehernberger’s donations are “invaluable.”

“It is a wealth of knowledge sitting here,” said Moede. “We have almost 1,200 boxes of photos and other information like articles of incorporation, schedules, accident reports. For future research purposes, it will be able to provide most information that anyone would want to find.”

Moede said Ehernberger’s donations of books to the center number in the hundreds or low thousands — all of them focusing on railroading in some way. They are headed to the Tappan Rare Book Library.

Ehernberger said after he got his job as a “call boy” going to hotels and Cheyenne residences at all hours to inform crew members who didn’t have telephones what time they needed to be back at work for the next train, he stayed at the railroad.

“My dad died about four months later, and so, I needed to make a living,” he said. Ehernberger would go on to work in several different positions such as crew dispatcher, train dispatcher, secretary to a UP superintendent and then take a buyout as a mid-level manager who had been responsible for operating rules, regulations, and safety in Cheyenne’s facility.

But the teen with the newly purchased Graflex camera from the yard manager also immediately went to work taking photos of steam engines and trains and pursuing his interest in railroad history.

He said he started his photos efforts along a little-known Burlington branch line into Cheyenne from Sterling, Colorado. Some of his earliest photos, published in Trains Magazine in 1955 when he was 17, were of trains on that line.

Ehernberger also became a charter member of the Wyoming State Historical Society and was active in railroad organizations.

“It’s not only been my career, it’s been my hobby,” he said.

Photographs

As a photographer, his images of steam engines chugging up mountains around the state before their end in 1959 still resonate.

He recently received third place in a national competition by the Center for Railroad Photography & Art which called for 2025 entrants to focus on “smoke.”

Ehernberger submitted an image of a Colorado & Southern Railway locomotive hauling cars up a grade 30 miles north of Cheyenne in a light snow in 1959. He said the engine was retired three months later.

He has photographed all 25 of the Union Pacific’s Big Boy steam locomotives that were used on the UP lines — all of them brought to Cheyenne for their maintenance over the years. 

“I used to walk through the shops and roundhouse,” he said. “They had a crane that could lift those up and they would drop the wheels and move them over to another place to work on them.”

Once he took the buyout from the railroad, his efforts as historian and photographer picked up steam. He said the camera he purchased for $250 in 1953 served him until 1972 when the film size was discontinued.

He purchased a Mamiya camera and a Pentax to take its place. Nearly all of his photos were done in black-and-white film, and he made a deal with a Cheyenne friend to develop his film and make the prints.

As a photographer, Ehernberger said he made it a point to go to every railroad station in Wyoming to document them when he realized as an employee that Union Pacific was starting to close locations.

“I thought, maybe I better take pictures of those railroad stations,” he said. “So, I made a real effort to go between Wyoming and Nebraska and some of Colorado and photographed as many stations as I could.”

World Travels

His favorite photo targets were the Colorado narrow gauge railroads of which only the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railway remains. But his fascination with railroads has taken him around the world seeking steam locomotives and railroad photographic possibilities.

“After I took my retirement from Union Pacific in 1988, I started an annual trip somewhere,” he said. “I’ve been to Brazil five times, and some of those trips, they just involved going to sugar plantations.”

He has also been to Cuba, China, South Africa, and several European countries.

“Most of this was in search of steam locomotives, because that’s my favorite, sometimes electric locomotives,” he said.

Ehernberger estimates his donation to the American Heritage Center includes more than 100,000 black-and-white negatives and another 50,000 photos.

His books and articles have made him sought after by other historians and railroad enthusiasts. Germany’s PBS crew has interviewed him in Cheyenne and then they invited over to Germany for a filming session.

And then there are the railroad geeks who want authenticity in their model railroad layout.

“I’ve had guys call me up and one of the funniest ones was that he wanted to know how many panes of glass a depot had,” he said. “Because he was doing a model of that.”

Over the years, Ehernberger’s attention to the demise of the industry he loves has paid dividends for future historians.

“When the Cheyenne depot closed, they just abandoned stuff and I managed to get those records,” he said. He also has collected engineering maps that go back to 1886 from the Union Pacific.

Blizzard Records

Among other records he managed to snag were the train dispatcher records for the Burlington railroad in Casper during the blizzard of 1949. He said he focused on all the railroad operations in Wyoming because the Colorado railroads had several collectors seeking documents and artifacts.

“I didn’t have any competition in Wyoming,” he said. “I could do whatever I wanted and get what I wanted.”

While he has now been retired from the railroad longer than he worked for it, Ehernberger still considers himself a railroad man. When the Big Boy locomotive in Cheyenne left the steam shop and was moved over to the train this summer, he was invited to ride in the cab. 

“I was able to climb the steep ladder steps without assistance,” he said. “I still have my first cup of coffee at 4 a.m. daily, and keep a busy schedule with the collection, or visiting the current steam shop, or writing and answering questions.”

Contact Dale Killingbeck at dale@cowboystatedaily.com

Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.