The Train [Appreciation] Station -- All Aboard the Friendship Express

[Bigdog]

Hello and welcome to the...

wait, hold on, I'm getting a note.

Okay, I've been informed that there was a small spelling error. It's not the Big Dog livestream, it's the Big Boy livestream. Couple of consonants there.

Anyway, today Union Pacific 4014, the newly restored representative of the Big Boy locomotive class, will be making its first real trip under its own power from Cheyenne, Wyoming to Ogden, Utah. There's a couple of livestreams going but all the ones I've found are on Facebook, which is as good of an argument as I've ever heard for a housecleaning of the corporate PR department. If (like me) you're weak enough to watch anyway, I'm currently watching the Trains Magazine page: https://www.facebook.com/TrainsMagazine/videos/

Here's a video of a shorter test run from a day or two ago:



As the video's title states, the Big Boys were the largest steam locomotive (well, largest reciprocating steam locomotive, which is what counts as a steam engine in most people's minds) by weight and by length sans tender. They were not quite the largest in terms of wheel arrangement, which is what people often think of-- both the Virginian Railway or ATSF's 2-10-10-2s and the Virginian's sole 2-8-8-8-4 would beat them on that score.

So let's all appreciate American railroading's mightiest and most famous phallic symbol of the 20th century.

[Perrydotto]

this rules even though I do not use Facebook

[Perrydotto]

giant oldschool trains are so cool

[Bigdog]

The livestream ended up sucking anyway. But here! Have a much better compilation of views of it on yesterday's run, doubleheaded with the 844 4-8-4.



Bit of trivia: the diesel locomotive behind the steam locomotives is not, so I've read, primarily there as a backup. Rather, it's there to use its dynamic braking to provide additional resistance and simulate a heavier load. Otherwise, having 4014 and 844 double-headed on a relatively short and probably not fully loaded passenger consist would be severe overkill, and (I assume) there might be unwanted train-handling issues as a result.

[Bigdog]

Necroing this thread because 4014 came into my city today, and I got to go out and watch her in person.

In many ways this was something I'd been waiting nigh on 30 years for. There have been operational steam locomotives my entire life, of course, and I've been privileged to see and even ride behind more than a few of them. But a restored Big Boy was always the quintessentially unachievable golden ring, technically possible to do but always to be longed after, never quite to be seriously undertaken by the sort of people who do these things. It would be too expensive. It would be limited by track conditions. There wasn't enough will to do it.

If only I could show 8-year-old Bigdog this video.



It's difficult to describe; words don't quite fail, but they succeed only in outlining, like the famous illusion of a triangle that exists only in the negative space of neighboring shapes. First the plume of smoke over the treeline, past the distant curve in the rails. Then the beam of the headlight down the straightaway, gleaming like some sort of sacred crystal artifact. Then—crossing bell ringing and whistle blowing—she strides into the near curve, and all of a sudden is upon you.

The video encodes details that the mortal eye missed, but as and in so doing, it paradoxically fails to encode the sublimity—the way in which, at that range and even at such a leisurely clip, the kinetic nature of a mind existing in time cannot apprehend all the details at once, just as one could not stand at the foot of K2 and grasp the whole. I remember looking up and seeing the "BIG BOY" and "V", as in "V for Victory", chalked on the smokebox (a tribute to the first Big Boy, which rolled off the line in 1941 with such a chalking). I saw the lines of the boiler but have no real recollection of the movement of her driving wheels as she passed abreast; they were just part of the great presence being borne along, as though she did not roll or push but simply slid past, a queen with her skirts lifted just enough to glide rather than drag. Only as she continued around the curve and out of sight did my mind register the motions of the rods and counterweights.

I recorded the rest of the train, and on most other days, behind smaller and more familiar locomotives, the consist of crisply painted passenger rolling stock would have been a sensation in itself. Here? An anticlimax. I say no more.


e: decided to update the thread title

[Gloomy Rube]

That's a big train

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

this is a rad thread

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

trains old or new, big or small are cool

and dang, that's a big one

[Gloomy Rube]

trains old or new, big or small are cool

and dang, that's a big one

but big ones are cooler

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

yes

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

i didn't even know they made steam trains that big

[Gloomy Rube]

i didn't even know they made steam trains that big

Same, but the world seems better and more magical now that I know this

[ToastGhost]

Was honestly expecting a large mammal of some sort

[Madeline]

Big steam loco

[Bigdog]

I'm on my phone right now but I'll have more media here at some future point

[Bigdog]

Pictures from yesterday, when she was on static display to the public at Kansas City's Union Station. Funnily enough, seeing a Big Boy on static display like this isn't nearly as big or unprecedented of a deal as seeing one operating; you do have to live near to or make a trip to one of the museums that has one, but there are several preserved and on display around the country and have been for decades. In fact, I'm certain I've been to see one before. But there was still something amazing about being this close to one that was a living, breathing machine so to speak-- little things like fresh lubrication, residual boiler heat, smell, etc.



Nameplate of the American Locomotive Company, better known to railfans by the sobriquet Alco. They made diesel locomotives for a few decades after the fall of steam and had probably the best fortunes of any of the steam locomotive builders when it came to making that transition. (Lima and Baldwin also tried, but fared not nearly so well.) Unfortunately, even Alco couldn't compete against the newcomers EMD and GE forever, and went out of business in the late 1960s. Their final few locomotives were delivered in January 1969, half a year before Americans walked on the Moon.



Here's where the magic happens, as a young proto-railfan (no relation to me) is finding out, hopefully to his delight. The red gunk is, I'm nearly positive, merely unfortunately colored grease and not a warning as to what happens if you get caught in the operating rods.



Full-length shot, not including the huge tender, which in any case was difficult to get a full shot of due to a passenger car parked on an adjacent track.



And! Finally, just this morning, here's a video I took as she left town headed westward. The long straightaway track, moderately increased distance from the track, and better lighting conditions all make this a worthy complement to the first video. But of course, there will never quite be anything like that first time, as the actress said to the Big Boy.

~*~trains~*~

I could rename this thread again and open it up to be a more general trains-appreciation thread if people wanted?

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

Trains

I'd be up for a train thread

[Madeline]

Voting “yes” on a train thread

[Gloomy Rube]

trains are cute so sure

[Bigdog]

done

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

[Fizzbuzz]

Does train travel count? I don't know much about train hardware, but I've gotten to go on long-haul train rides before and they're really special. This account of the journey from New York to Los Angeles puts it better than I could, but having traveled one of those same routes (the Southwest Chief, specifically) I can confirm it's accurate.

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

it involves a train, i say it counts

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

picture taken from wikipedia

this is the type of electric train used in serbia (Class 441). i used to live near a train station (near in the sense that i was several blocks away, but still a walk away) and would see them fairly often. May not be the prettiest, but i like them.

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

and was pretty much the train pulling whenever i travelled anywhere by train

i kind of love that noise electric locomotives make

[Gloomy Rube]

Red + Blue color scheme is cute so that's a good train

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

yeah, it owns

[Bigdog]

Does train travel count? I don't know much about train hardware, but I've gotten to go on long-haul train rides before and they're really special. This account of the journey from New York to Los Angeles puts it better than I could, but having traveled one of those same routes (the Southwest Chief, specifically) I can confirm it's accurate.

I was privileged to be able to ride Amtrak frequently (= long distance trips about once a year) as a kid and it was good

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

oh that sounds wonderful

[Fizzbuzz]

A trip like that is something I recommend doing at least once in your life if you can. You get to take in the land a whole lot better than you do up in the air and you can actually sit and look at it all vs. paying attention to the road if you're driving. If you can get a berth in one of the sleeper cars, it's practically a vacation of its own.

[Bigdog]

picture taken from wikipedia

this is the type of electric train used in serbia (Class 441). i used to live near a train station (near in the sense that i was several blocks away, but still a walk away) and would see them fairly often. May not be the prettiest, but i like them.

electric trains are cool and sadly underutilized in America outside of highly specific rapid transit/passenger rail. It seems like we don't even have a lot of the main or branch line (as opposed to a specialized passenger corridor) electrification that some railroads had in the middle of the 20th century.



The GG1 is one of the most distinctive and awesome looking locomotives you'll find anywhere. Presumably its name derives from the fact that all the other manufacturers looked at it and immediately said "GG" as they knew they could never make anything nearly as cool.

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

it's so rad, i love it

[Madeline]

I love trains

[Madeline]

Look at the front of the GG1 there, it reminds me of the prow of a ship. I know there’s good reasons for this but it also looks cool and distinctive

[Bigdog]

Inverted, you mean? That's actually a cool observation

[Madeline]

Yeah, it looks like it kind of folds inward in a couple of spots in order to form the front of the car, and I dig that.

[Bigdog]

Yup! Those cutaways are, at least in part, to provide visibility from the centrally located cab, but obviously it's been done in a way that's informed by stylistic considerations.

Streamlined trains from around the middle of the 20th century are really interesting, because when you look at the steam and electric locomotives, a lot of them were bespoke designs built for a particular railroad (if not straight up built in-house at that railroad) and not sold to any other railroad. Occasionally you'd see similar designs, like the bullet nose style visible on both the NYC's Dreyfuss 4-6-4s and N&W's J-class 4-8-4s, but those were more convergent evolution than any direct copying of the type.

With diesel locomotives, on the other hand, the manufacturers (EMD, Alco, Baldwin, etc.) very quickly settled on standardized designs and just cranked them out. So while EMD's F units, for example, have a classic and beautiful design, it was pretty much the same for every F unit on every railroad, with relatively small differences based on model number and equipment options (like one headlight vs. 2).




But as always, there's exceptions. There were models of diesel locomotives that, because of narrow or niche appeal, were only ever made for a small handful of railroads, and it's here you see the weird and cool designs that never caught in the way EMD's or Alco's cab units did. ( A cab unit is a diesel locomotive with a full-width cowl body along most or all of its length. Contrast with a hood unit, which has a narrower body with room for walkways on either sides. Just about every freight locomotive made since, like, 1960 is a hood unit.)

For instance, here is the Baldwin RF-16 "Sharknose", which I'm sure Daikatuna will appreciate:

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

neato!

[Fizzbuzz]

I thought of this thread today and remembered a possibly appropriate video.

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

now that's a blast from the past