you're one, too

I started writing the story before I had the story.  I started writing the story as I imagined it would be  - and I was wrong.  It’s too bad because I liked my words, but in the end, I had to throw them away and start over. The story, it turns out, wasn’t about me being a part of some lunatic-fringe subset of society. The story is that we all are.  

I’ll tell you a secret.

If you were to come into the closet with me and shut the door . . . waaay back into the closet, behind my old high school marching band uniform, behind the jacket I wore at my wedding, and behind that skeleton . . .  and if you promised not to tell, I might confess to you that I’m a railroad nerd. And, while we’re in this safe and private place, you can confess it, too.  

We generally keep this quiet because train nerds are not an attractive bunch, but now that we have shared this intimate admission, I think we can connect on a deeper level. 

Your train nerd-ness probably looks a lot like mine.  Maybe you’ve chosen Amtrak for a vacation or two. You could have flown, but you thought the train experience would be fun.  You’ve probably visited a museum with an exhibit on trains because they’re such an important piece of American history. And when you’re approaching a railroad crossing in your car, there’s a bit of anticipation - will a train come?  We don’t mind waiting and watching, because when a train goes by, it takes our imagination with it.  

But, we’re mild in our train nerd-ness, you and me. We’re not the nerdiest nerds who ever nerded-out over trains.  We’re not as hardcore as those “foamers” who write biographies of individual locomotives, or keep a log of the rolling stock they’ve seen. We don’t sit beside the tracks with a radio scanner and listen to railroad company communications. We don’t spend hours in our basements in an HO-scale fantasy world of our own creation.    

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

We just find the history and the systems and the engineering and the travel to be interesting, and yeah, we get caught up in the romance just a little bit.  

So last summer when Union Pacific was running an historic locomotive around their trackage, showing it off to the public, I thought I would go see it.  It would make a stop in a small town not too far from where I live.

My expectation was that there would be only a handful of spectators: me and some history buffs, old nostalgics, and a small collection of railfans.  That’s when I started writing about train nerds, and I have to admit, I was making fun of them. 

Trains outside our lodge in Montana.

I remember sitting in a trackside lodge in Montana a number of years ago and a train was coming.  It was hardly a rare occurrence because we were only about fifty feet away from BNSF’s main line that connects Chicago to the container-shipping ports of the Pacific Northwest. Trains came every few minutes.  The lodge catered to railroad nerds, and was full of them. When trains approached, they’d spill out the front door and make a frenzied dash to the right-of-way to shoot photos and video, wave wildly at the engineer, and quickly write in their logbooks the numbers of the locomotives they had just seen.  It got to be as much fun watching the nerds as it was to watch the trains.   

One man in particular seemed to lose all of his poise and dignity when a train approached.  A heavy-set guy with 1970s sideburns, he’d sprint from the porch to the tracks with his jacket flying out behind him and the front edge of his toupee peeling up and away from his forehead. He was a true-life caricature of a train nerd, and it was guys like him that I assumed would be there in Belle Plaine, Iowa to see the historic locomotive. 

And so I started writing the story about standing around a small Iowa town with a squad of railfans, waiting for the train.  I wrote about them being mostly men. Guys who have let their hobby become an obsession and a lifestyle. Guys who let their hygiene and fashion sense go.  Guys with bad comb-overs, who iron their blue jeans, and sew patches of their favorite railroad insignia onto their nylon windbreakers.  

I wrote about guys who show off to each other that they know the railroad lingo and the tech-specs of the motive power. Guys who get so excited about railroads that their voices notch upward and little bits of breakfast fly from their teeth when they talk trains. 

I wrote about arriving early, standing there with the nerds for a while, and then the train would come and they’d wet their pants, and shoot a lot of pictures and enter it into their logbooks and they’d still be full of excitement when I went off to find lunch somewhere.  

That’s what I wrote about.  Nerds, dorks, foamers - and that’s where I was wrong.

The locomotive that we were going to see was a pretty big deal.  It was a Big Boy 4-8-8-4 - the biggest, most powerful steam locomotive ever made.  It was built near the end of the steam era, and it had a job to do: hauling heavy freight over the western mountains.  It was 1941. We had a world war looming and a great depression to pull ourselves out of and in those days, heavy industry was really, really heavy.  When a hard job needed a big machine, we didn’t mess around. 

Let me give you some numbers

Together with its tender, the Big Boy is 133 feet long. For perspective, that’s long enough that if it were sitting on a football field, it would stretch from the goal line to beyond the 40-yard line.  It carries 28 tons of fuel. The boiler holds 25,000 gallons of water.  It weighs a million and a quarter pounds. Read that again and think about it - a million and a quarter pounds!   

A Big Boy steam locomotive can produce an amazing 7,000 horsepower, and a practically unbelievable 135,375 lb/ft of torque.  It can go 80 miles per hour. It is a crushing-huge mammoth of a machine. Union Pacific had 25 of them built. They were big and heavy and strong and fast and dangerous and that’s how we rolled in the 1940s. 

‘Murica!

This was my one chance to see it - not sitting silently in some museum, but on the tracks, smoking, steaming, pulling a real train, and I just couldn’t miss it. 

Not really expecting her to say yes, I asked MSL if she wanted to go along, and she surprised me.  Then she asked her brother, too. I told my parents about the plans and pretty soon we had a carload.  I was happy to not be going alone - I’d have some non-nerds to share the day with.  

Mom and Dad are old enough to remember steam trains. They’re old enough to remember going to a depot in the center of town, instead of an airport out on the edge, and from there you could connect to anywhere.  Mom grew up in a house within a block of the tracks, and in the summers, she and the neighborhood kids were allowed to stay outside until the Rocket-Zephyr came through on it’s nightly run from St. Louis to St. Paul.  She remembers the sickening sound of a train hitting a firetruck as it was speeding to an emergency - it happened right outside and some of the firemen died. My grandparents wouldn’t let her look at the wreckage. It’s hard to think of American history without giving significant attention to trains, and for many people still alive today, that history is part of their personal memory.

It was a beautiful summer day when we set out to see the Big Boy.  Belle Plaine is a small town about an hour’s drive south of our home.  I remember when I was very young we would go through Belle Plaine when we went to visit my uncle and we’d almost always have to wait for a train.  The tracks have transitioned through various owners, and today serve UP’s heavy traffic corridor from Chicago to Omaha. Union Pacific’s website promised that the Big Boy would stop for ten minutes for gawkers like us to look at it.  

Highway 21 curves into Belle Plaine as you approach from the north.  I expected we’d be able to park a few feet from the tracks and stand by the old passenger depot to wait for the train, but as we rounded the curve, traffic ground to a halt and backed-up blocks from downtown.  Belle Plaine was jammed with people. This was not just a small handful of train nerds, it was all of Benton County.     

Eventually, we found a place to park a few blocks away and merged into the stream of people walking to the tracks.  It was like the circus was in town. The air was electric with anticipation and people were in from all over. Crowds lined both sides of the triple-track for blocks.  

Grandparents, children, families, middle-aged people. Guys in suits and guys in greasy overalls and people in the uniforms of every trade there is.  Packs of middle schoolers pushed through the crowd, boisterous and obnoxious. Others had set up lawn chairs and picnics on the grassy berm and were, apparently, making a day of it.  I kept picking up bits of conversations: old people saying, “I remember when”, and young people listening like they were really interested. Librarians, convenience store clerks, dentists, insurance agents, business owners, farmers, photographers and yes, train nerds.  We were ALL there to see the Big Boy.  

The train was running late, as they do, about ten minutes, then fifteen.  It only served to heighten the anticipation - everyone looking east to be the first to see the smoke in the distance.

The crowd pushed in, too close to the tracks, and a couple of UP cops shouted to get back.  While we waited, Union Pacific sent a warm-up act - two modern, working trains: one, a unit-train of tank cars and the other a drag of empty grainers. They roared and rumbled and split the air with their mighty horns and on any other day they would have been enough to send a train nerd home satisfied, but the Big Boy was coming. 

When, finally, there was a black smudge rising above the trees in the distance, a shout went up and passed in a wave through the crowd.  There was no point pretending to be nonchalant about it. I was one of the first to see it and I pointed and shouted and maybe jumped up and down a little, and if it had been just a few of us there, it would have been embarrassing.  But it wasn’t just a few of us. We were all there, and we were all excited, and everyone else was pointing and shouting, too.  

Big Boy came into Belle Plaine in a slow and stately way, bell ringing and whistle blowing like a pipe organ with a sore throat.  From a distance, it looked just how I’ve always imagined a steam locomotive looks, and not that remarkable, but then it just kept getting bigger and bigger until when it passed, I couldn’t fit it all into my camera frame.  

It was mammoth.  A marvel. A colossus.  A wildly complicated contraption of pistons, rods, and wheels all spinning, rotating, swinging, bobbing, pumping, sliding and turning.  You can’t see it in motion and not be awed by the human minds which could conjure such a thing.  

It’s hard to not think of Big Boy as being alive. He has a circulatory system of water, steam and air. He has breathing lungs and a beating heart, a nose, a mouth, and a voice.  And the way he connects, somehow, to all of us across the generations, he surely must have a soul, as well. 

Big Boy in Belle Plaine, Iowa, 2019

He eases to a stop, the crowd surges forward and surrounds him.  The crew climbs down and does the PR thing. They’re rockstars. Selfies are shot, babies are kissed, the engineer could have won an election. 

Turn your brain back seventy years and imagine the smoke and the smell and the sound of a trainyard full of these things.  Imagine the danger of working around all that un-guarded machinery. Imagine the chugging and the psssssssing and the honest-to-God choo-chooing - the potential energy poised to be released - the potential adventure if you were lucky enough to ride along.

Union Pacific chose 2019 to take Big Boy on-tour as a celebration of the sesquicentennial of the completion of the trans-continental railroad. Strongly supported by President Lincoln in the aftermath of our civil war, it was an audacious project of engineering that many considered impossible.  But the Central Pacific started laying track at one end and the Union Pacific at the other and they met in Utah in 1869. The transcontinental railroad ensured the USA’s hold on the width of the continent and prompted advances in timekeeping and communication that we still use today.  

One of the fascinating elements of history is how long the era of steam-powered trains lasted.  The last of UP’s Big Boys was retired from service in 1959 . . . and just ten years later, Neil Armstrong took a small step/giant leap onto the surface of the moon.  The steam age and the space age were only separated by a blink in time. From the golden spike in 1869 to the lunar landing in 1969, what an amazing century that was for transportation, technology, and America.  

Standing trackside, Big Boy towers above me.  The cab is as high as a second-story window. His driving wheels are as tall as me.  Every single piece of him is made of heavy iron. I can feel the heat from his boiler.  He smells like hot oil. Except for some hissing and dripping, Big Boy at-rest is remarkably quiet.  

Belle Plaine adored Big Boy - everyone pressed in to touch him.  Parents raised kids up on their shoulders so they could see over the crowd.  Geezers with walkers smiled and quietly wiped their eyes. It was beautiful to see something like Big Boy lovingly restored to his fully-operational glory.  There were no speeches - just some folks from Union Pacific mingling with the crowd, sharing information, and all of us either remembering or imagining a time when the journey was part of the experience, and not just an inconvenient transition.  

Big Boy preparing to leave Belle Plaine, IA 2019

Big Boy was already running late, and getting later by the minute.  He hung around as long as he said he would, and we would have loved for him to stay a little longer, but it was time to move on.  The crew climbed back aboard and blew the whistle. The police moved us all back. With a huge exhalation of steam, and a mighty tug on his cars, Big Boy moved an inch, then a foot, then a yard, and then with momentum on his side, rolled on out of town.  

We weren’t done with him, though.

We chased along the parallel highway and got ahead of him.  Stopped outside the tiny hamlet of Montour and watched him charge through with a full head of steam: whistling like crazy and his driving parts all blurry with the motion.  We caught up again in Marshalltown where he stopped for lunch and the crowd was twice as big as Belle Plaine.  

It was a great day, and what I love the most about the Big Boy, is that everyone else loves him, too.  We love what he is, what he was, and what he stands for: nostalgia, romance, power, freedom. He’s a train like the ones in our childrens books, he choo-choos and chuff-chuffs and smokes and steams.  The engineer wears a striped cap and leans way out the window and cheerfully waves back at you. He’s everything a train is supposed to be.  

Being in the crowd in Belle Plaine was one of those supreme moments of Americana that make me so thankful to be here.  And in the end, I realized that I don’t have to be secretive about loving trains - about being a train nerd - because we all are, and you’re one, too.