Huge Big Boy steam locomotive coming back to life

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — In its prime, a massive steam locomotive known as Big Boy No. 4014 was a moving eruption of smoke and vapor, a 6,300-horsepower brute dragging heavy freight trains over the mountains of Wyoming and Utah.

It's been silent for half a century, pushed aside by more efficient diesels, but now it's coming back to life. The Union Pacific Railroad is embarking on a yearslong restoration project that will put No. 4014 back to work pulling special excursion trains.

"It's sort of like going and finding the Titanic or something that's just very elusive, nothing that we ever thought would happen," said Jim Wrinn, editor of Trains, a magazine that covers the railroad industry.

"Something that's so large and powerfuland magnificent, we didn't think any of them would ever come back," he said.

The American Locomotive Co. in Schenectady, N.Y., built 25 of the monsters to Union Pacific's specifications between 1941 and 1944, and they became legendary. They were the largest steam locomotives ever to work the rugged terrain of the American West, and by most standards the largest anywhere in the world, said Gordon McCulloh, a meticulous historian of Union Pacific steam power.

Even the name is legendary. An unknown worker scrawled "Big Boy" on the front of one of the engines when it was under construction.

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"It came out one day, and it had 'Big Boy' in chalk on it. And from that day forward, it was Big Boy," said Ed Dickens Jr., Union Pacific's senior manager of