Everybody Loves Big Boy

My name is Noelle and I’m a fan of the world’s largest operating steam locomotive. I used to think this was a unique fact about me. But recently our tiny fandom has exploded. Big Boy, as he’s called—Christian name: Union Pacific No. 4014—retired in 1961 when diesel-electric engines made cumbersome steam trains unnecessary. In recent years, he has emerged from hibernation for heritage tours out west, so his fans can see his 1.2 million-pound body and human-sized wheels up close. And this year, Union Pacific announced something unprecedented: Big Boy would travel off his home turf, cross-country, all the way to the East Coast and back. 

Officially this was in honor of America’s 250th birthday; unofficially, people surmised this had something to do with Union Pacific’s intended merger with Norfolk Southern, which owns track in the East. But train enthusiasts—who prefer “railfans” and definitely do not prefer “foamers”—didn’t care why Big Boy was coming. All that mattered was when and where. Every day they flooded Facebook with dozens of fresh, breathless sightings—there he was in Argos, Indiana; Payne, Ohio; Portageville, New York—and every day another tiny, desperate Rust Belt chamber of commerce announced its local Big Boy celebration with an AI slop flyer. 

Everywhere Big Boy chugged, people screamed, waved, sometimes cried or took wedding photos or, in one case, tried to climb him and fell and went to the hospital for a spine fracture. On July 2, a police department in Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg Township declared the Big Boy watch event a “mass casualty incident” after the heat sent 35 people to the hospital.