TEXARKANA, Ark. - A piece of the past rolled through town Tuesday, leaving hundreds of impressed witnesses in its wake.
A crowd gathered trackside to get a look at Union Pacific Railroad's fully restored Big Boy steam locomotive No. 4014, which stopped for 45 minutes in Texarkana as part of an interstate tour.
The train was behind schedule, and onlookers waited about 20 minutes past the train's slated stop time to see a sight they may never have the chance to experience again. The crowd included many school-age children.
A plume of smoke and steam from the engine was visible over the horizon before the train came into sight. It rolled into view, the engineer blasted its whistle, and dozens of cellphones held aloft took its picture before it squealed to a stop beside Front Street downtown.
"It was big. And loud," Bill Hawkins said, echoing the reaction of many in attendance.
"It was awesome, bigger than I actually thought because I've never seen one in real life, but definitely one of a kind," Steven Gauerke said.
Claire Smith, who moved to the U.S. from Paris 20 years ago, said the train reminded her of her childhood.
"When I was little, I traveled in France with my family on the train, in the steam train. It was fantastic when you had somebody waiting for you," Smith said.
The train had made an earlier stop Tuesday in Atlanta, Texas, and was scheduled to stop in Hope, Arkansas, and Prescott, Arkansas, later in the day.
The engine began the current leg of its tour on Nov. 1 in El Paso, Texas. So far, it has traveled across South Texas to Houston, then northward through East Texas and into Arkansas. It will proceed through Northeast Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado before reaching Cheyenne, Wyoming, on Nov. 27.
The tour commemorates the completion of the transcontinental railroad 150 years ago.
The Big Boy's return to the rails is the product of more than two years of meticulous restoration work. No. 4014 is the world's only operating Big Boy locomotive. It is longer than two city buses, weighs more than a Boeing 747 fully loaded with passengers and can pull 16 Statues of Liberty over a mountain, according to UP.
Big Boys hauled freight between Wyoming and Utah in the 1940s and 1950s. Of the 25 built by the American Locomotive Co. in Schenectady, New York, from 1941 to 1944, eight remain. Only No. 4014 is operational. It was retired in late 1961, and until now no Big Boy engine had run since 1962.
Union Pacific towed Big Boy No. 4014 to Cheyenne in 2014 after acquiring it from a museum in Pomona, California.
"They had to basically completely disassemble the locomotive down to just the frame and the shell," said Jim Wrinn, editor of Trains magazine. "It was an immense undertaking."
The locomotives are not only big, they're so complex that steam train buffs long considered restoring one to a fully operational state all but impossible.
They were the "pinnacle of steam locomotive design" in the years before diesel engines took over as the less expensive, more efficient standard for U.S. railroads, Wrinn said.
"It's a pretty big deal," Wrinn said. "Nobody ever thought that a Big Boy would be restored to operation. Ever."
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
