I have been trackside for a lot of things over the years, but I have never seen anything quite like the last two months. Union Pacific “Big Boy” 4014 came east for the first time in the locomotive’s history, and everywhere it went, the crowds came. Not just railfan crowds, “everyone” crowds. Families staking out grade crossings two hours early. Local TV leading the evening news with steam. Facebook groups “blowing up” with Big Boy questions, sightings, photos, and memories. Whistle stops in small towns of eight hundred people drawing five thousand.
For most of the communities along the route, this was the first mainline steam since Nickel Plate 765’s NS employee specials back in 2013. For plenty of them, it was the first big steam power, period, in living memory. When 4014 laid over at Steamtown in mid-June, sitting next to sister 4012 for the first-ever meeting of two Big Boys, the place drew record attendance. There is something going on here that is bigger than our hobby.
Why This Trip Happened, and Why Now
The occasion is America’s 250th. UP announced the coast-to-coast tour as the centerpiece of its America 250 celebration: a western leg that wrapped up in Sacramento in April, then east out of Cheyenne in late May across Norfolk Southern to Buffalo, Scranton, Philadelphia for the Fourth of July itself, and Altoona. That made it the first time a Big Boy has ever operated east of Chicago, and the first time one has ever turned a wheel (under its own power) in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Indiana. The full schedule is on UP’s steam site, and the tour announcement has the background. Both railroads brought commemorative power to the party: UP unveiled its America250 unit No. 1776 in March, and NS answered in May with a six-unit “America’s 250” series painted at Juniata, including its own No. 1776, “The Bell,” honoring the Liberty Bell the Pennsylvania Railroad once carried. Both 1776s ran in the consist for much of the trip east.
But you cannot talk about a UP steam locomotive touring Norfolk Southern’s railroad in 2026 without acknowledging the other context: the proposed UP–NS merger sitting in front of the Surface Transportation Board. The revised application was accepted for consideration at the end of May, with proceedings currently held in abeyance while the applicants prepare supplemental filings due later this month, and an Environmental Impact Statement and public meetings still to come. I will save my industry opinions on a transcontinental combination for another post. But it is fair to observe that a beloved steam locomotive drawing hundreds of thousands of smiling people to NS rails, hauling matched patriotic locomotives from both companies, is about the best goodwill campaign money can buy while regulators and shippers weigh the largest railroad merger ever proposed. Make of the timing what you will!
The Locomotive
For readers who found this post from outside the hobby: Big Boy 4014 is one of twenty-five 4-8-8-4s built by the American Locomotive Company between 1941 and 1944 to lift UP freight over the Wasatch grades between Ogden and Cheyenne. Engine and tender together stretch about 132 feet and weigh roughly 1.2 million pounds, the largest operating steam locomotive in the world. 4014 was delivered in December 1941, ran just over a million miles (according to UP), and was retired at the end of the steam era, spending five decades on display at the fairgrounds in Pomona, California. UP reacquired it in 2013, and the steam crew in Cheyenne, the same shop that maintains 844 (the locomotive that was never retired), returned it to service in 2019 for the 150th anniversary of the golden spike, converted to oil firing in the process.
June 9: Chasing Big Boy on the NS Lake District
My friend Mike and I took the day off on Tuesday, June 9, to chase the train, running as NS 061 east on the Lake District, the former Nickel Plate main along the Lake Erie shore, heading for its Buffalo display date. Everybody and their brother had the same idea, so Mike’s strategy was simple: skip the grade crossings and the whistle stops, and shoot the locations with “drone-only access.” No crowds, no elbows, no parked cars for a half mile in every direction — just walk in, put the drone up, and photograph locations that most of the chase would drive right past.
First up was the Elk Creek Viaduct near Girard, a 1902 steel trestle the Nickel Plate threw across one of the deep creek valleys that slice through northwestern Pennsylvania on their way to the lake. The crossing was documented by the Historic American Engineering Record as a textbook example of the long trestles this topography demanded; watching a 1941 articulated stride across a 1902 trestle at slow speed, glistening passenger consist, was worth the price of admission all by itself.
From there we leapfrogged east to Bort Road outside North East, PA, in the heart of Lake Erie’s Concord grape belt. This is classic Lake District railroading: the ex-Nickel Plate and the old New York Central Lake Shore main running roughly parallel through the vineyards, and the town itself home to the Lake Shore Railway Museum and its collection of locally-built GE power.
Across the state line, our next stop was the Nickel Plate’s trestle over the Chautauqua Creek gorge at Westfield, New York, another drone-only proposition and another of the deep lake-plain gorges the railroad has had to bridge since the line opened through here in 1882. Westfield is grape country still, the town where the National Grape Cooperative and Welch’s put down roots, and 061 striding across the gorge above the vineyards made one of my favorite frames of the day. You can also see the CSXT (ex-NYC) back there top left – illustrating how close together these two parallel main lines can be along the lake shore.
Then a last-minute audible: rather than call it a day, we kept going east to Dunkirk, New York, and it turned out to be the best decision of the chase. Dunkirk is a locomotive town in its own right, home of the Brooks Locomotive Works, which built engines here from 1869 and folded into ALCO in 1901. The Erie Railroad made Dunkirk its original western terminus in 1851, the New York Central’s Lake Shore route came through a year later, and the Nickel Plate arrived in 1882. We watched 4014 make an unscheduled flag stop right where a former Conrail (ex-NYC) industrial track still crosses the Nickel Plate at grade: an ALCO product pausing on a diamond in an ALCO company town, seventy-five-plus years after the hometown works went quiet. Not bad!
Altoona in July
Fast forward a month, and the show came to us. 4014 arrived in Altoona the evening of July 8 to an enormous reception; the city was bracing for something like 50,000 visitors over three days, with shuttle buses running from the ballpark and the mall. On Thursday the 9th, my wife and I attended the Railroaders Memorial Museum’s benefit dinner at the Blair County Convention Center, with retired NS CEO Wick Moorman, the man who gave us 21st Century Steam (and by extension that 2013 memory of the 765), speaking on steam preservation. Among the displays was a live steam model of 4014 itself, which drew its own crowd of admirers all evening. Big steam apparently casts a long shadow at any scale.
On Friday morning, July 10, we took in the public display NS hosted at its Rose Yard, free admission, and they did it right: 4014 posed with UP 1616, the “Abraham Lincoln” commemorative SD70M, plus the America’s 250 units “The Bell,” “The Lady Liberty,” and “The Freedom,” heritage units, a safety train, and a traveling rail history museum. Fitting, given that the 250 units were painted a few hundred yards away at Juniata. The detail shots show the 250th regalia 4014 carried across the country: flags, heralds, and all.
Saturday morning, July 11, the Big Boy departed Altoona for points west: up the Allegheny grade, around Horseshoe Curve for a photo stop at the sold-out museum event, then through the New Portage tunnel at Gallitzin (to the dismay of many), and past our front porch. We watched from The Station Inn in Cresson, where the crowds along the old Pennsy Main were as thick as I have ever seen them, including a group of onlookers who claimed front-row seats atop Jordan Spreader CR 64637, the retired Conrail plow that sits trackside in Cresson.
Thoughts on the Big Boy Trip
The photos are why we chase, but the thing I will remember about this trip is the people. One columnist covering the Altoona stop reported that something like a quarter of a million Pennsylvanians turned out along the route. Governor Josh Shapiro, who showed up in Altoona, remarked that he was there more as a railfan than a governor, and that Americans still want to come together. That matches what I saw at every location: no politics, no arguments, no angle. Just thousands of neighbors standing shoulder to shoulder in the sun, waiting on a whistle, cheering a machine that eighty-five years ago was simply somebody’s day job. In a news cycle that gives us precious few stories everyone can enjoy at the same time, a million-pound locomotive managed to be one. Railroading was the good news for a few weeks this summer. To paraphrase my friend Dave Magill, how great is it that the public is this excited to see a train?? I would take more of that.
If you made it trackside for any of the eastern tour, I would love to hear where you caught it. Drop a comment below.
