The Overland Tales
Chapter 5: The Last, Last of the Giants
My dreams of seeing a Big Boy in operation go back almost 50 years when I first encountered #4012, then part of the Steamtown U.S.A. museum near Bellows Falls, VT. “Museum” is a generous word to describe Steamtown in the 1970’s. It wasn’t much more than a gravel and dirt expanse filled by 50+ inoperable steam-powered machines, a few small buildings and a no-frills “engine house” where a handful of locomotives were kept in working order for the daily excursion trains. It wasn’t much, but it was paradise — my paradise. I’m not sure my mother saw it that way, but she provided plenty of time for me to wander amongst the relics. And for that I am grateful.
Trips to Steamtown from our lake cottage in New Hampshire were highlights of summer for me. I anticipated every curve of US Route 5, peering ahead for the two small wooden signs that marked the turn-off for Steamtown Road. It wasn’t much of a road, dropping downhill from the highway, through a metal gate, across the Green Mountain Railway tracks past a toy-like water tower and into a very rustic parking lot. First impressions were not Steamtown’s forte.
Next to the lot, a small modern building sported a station sign for “Riverside,” the name given to these several acres of flat land between the Rutland Railroad tracks and Connecticut River. Beyond lay the promised land of steam. Of all the steam traction engines, locomotive and other machines of yore, two were “mine”: the magnificently designed Nickel Plate Road #759 (the first big locomotive I ever saw under steam) and Union Pacific #4012, one of the giant Big Boys. Both were located in the far back corner of the site, so our visits began with a brisk walk past all the displays to begin with the best and the biggest. We’d see the rest later.
#4012 was much too big for Steamtown to operate, or to even be pushed onto the turntable and displayed on one of the radial tracks where most of the locomotives were spending their retirement. Thus, by need more than choice, the Big Boy sat on a separate track next to the main. The whole scenario was an elephant-on-a-stool trick, as the siding and the ground under it provided very little support for the giant locomotive. Steamtown did not have the funding required to keep all their displays cleaned and painted, and eventually a very tattered #4012 sank into the mud, partially derailed. But none of that mattered to me. I was standing next to a Big Boy.
Across the yellow pebble midway sat elderly, wooden Boston & Maine combination car #959: The Movie Car. The end once used for passenger seating was now a humble waiting area of rough bench seats. Through the interior door, a seated “theater” was built in the former baggage compartment. Where the newspapers, milk cans and steamer trunks of New England once rode; now tourists gathered to be entertained by 16mm films projected on an old-school screen positioned in front of folding chairs. The air lay heavy with dank railroad musk built up over 80-years of service. #959 was no Lowe’s movie palace, but it was where The Last of the Giants was screened day in and day out.
Ah, The Last of the Giants. Director Allan Krieg’s 1959 opus on the waning years of the Big Boys in regular service. The film, sponsored by the Union Pacific itself, was the only way a ’70’s kid could see a Big Boy under steam. And did I see it. Over and over. My poor mother would await the final scene of a freight train rolling off into a Wyoming sunset as the melancholy uncredited narrator cautions that, “The rumble and roar of Big Bioy will seem still to echo from the high country of southern Wyoming.” As she rose from her metal chair, the inevitable question would come. “Can we watch it again, mom?”
The appeal of Big Boy never waned. In my tween years, mom would drop me off at Steamtown in the morning, visit the leather outlet or other shops downriver in Brattleboro, and pick me up at closing time. My routine stayed true: pay the entry admission and head straight back to where lonely #4012 sat in the Vermont mud.
Around 1985, #4012 and most of the Steamtown collection left Vermont for a new home in Scranton, Pennsylvania. A year later, I also moved there, as a freshman at the University of Scranton. The Big Boy was displayed directly behind the school just a 90 second walk from my dorm. Eventually, the collection became the nucleus of the Steamtown National Historic Site in downtown Scranton. #4012 was moved to a prominent place by the parking lot (and is now undergoing a thorough cosmetic restoration). The movie car tradition faded away, but at least kids no longer had to wander past everything else to see the biggest of the big.
It was some twenty some years ago that Mike, Jimmy and I made a promise while standing in front of #4012 that if someone ever restored one of these beasts to operation we would be there to see it run. And here we are now on a beautiful Ogden afternoon. All three of us face to face with a hot, living Big Boy.
The reborn last, last of the giants.
Read the entire ebook version with many additional photographs
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