A long time ago, in 1941, in a big factory in a city called Schenectady, New York, a group of workers were building a steam engine. Not just any steam engine. This one was going to be enormous.
They built its boiler, as long as a bus and then some. They built its wheels, and each big driving wheel was almost as tall as a grown-up. And they didn't build just four of those big wheels, or eight. They built sixteen.
One day, one of the workers looked up at this giant engine. He picked up a piece of chalk, and on the round front of the engine he wrote two words:
BIG BOY
And do you know what? The name stuck. From that day on, everybody called these engines Big Boys.
Why build an engine so big?
The engines belonged to a railroad called the Union Pacific. Union Pacific trains carried things all across the country. Food. Cars. Lumber. Machines. All kinds of things that people needed.
But there was a problem. Out west, between Wyoming and Utah, there were mountains in the way. Big, steep mountains called the Wasatch. Pulling a long, heavy train up a mountain is very, very hard work. Smaller engines had to team up, two or three engines on one train, huffing and puffing together to get over the top.
The railroad wanted one engine strong enough to pull a long, heavy train up the mountains all by itself. So they asked for the biggest, strongest engine anyone could build.
And that's how Big Boy was born.
How big is big?
A Big Boy is so long that if you laid it down on a football field, it would stretch more than a third of the way down the field. Counting the tender, the car right behind the engine that carries its fuel and water, a Big Boy is about as long as three school buses parked bumper to bumper.
And heavy! A Big Boy with its tender weighs more than a million pounds. That's about as much as two hundred elephants.
Big Boy is so long that it couldn't go around curves if it was all one stiff piece. So it was built in a clever way: it bends in the middle. The front set of wheels can swing a little to the side, separate from the back set, so the engine can wiggle around curves like a giant caterpillar.
Chug, chug, CHUG
Big Boy burned coal to make fire, and the fire boiled water to make steam. The steam pushed on big pistons, and the pistons turned the wheels. Chuff... chuff... chuff, chuff, chuff-chuff-chuff! The faster it went, the faster it puffed.
There were 25 Big Boys in all. For almost twenty years they worked hard every day, pulling trains over the mountains, through snow and wind and sun. People who lived near the tracks would hear them coming from far away: a deep, rumbling roar and a long, low whistle that echoed off the hills.
Time to rest
But trains changed. New engines came along called diesels. They didn't need coal or water, and they were easier to take care of. One by one, the big steam engines stopped working. The last Big Boys finished their jobs around 1959.
Most of them were taken apart. But eight Big Boys were saved. They were moved to museums and parks in different cities, where children and grown-ups could come and stand next to them, look up, up, up at those giant wheels, and imagine what it was like when they roared over the mountains.
For a long time, that's all the Big Boys did. They rested. They were quiet.
Big Boy wakes up
But one Big Boy, number 4014, had an amazing adventure still waiting for it.
For many years, 4014 sat quietly in California. Then one day, the Union Pacific railroad decided to bring it home and do something nobody had done in about sixty years. They were going to make a Big Boy run again.
It took a team of workers years to fix it. They took it apart, piece by piece. They cleaned and repaired and replaced. They fixed the boiler. They fixed the wheels. They changed it so it could burn oil instead of coal. Bit by bit, Big Boy got ready.
And then, in May 2019, they lit the fire. The water boiled. The steam built up. And with a hiss and a huff and a great big CHUFF, Big Boy 4014 began to roll down the tracks again.
Thousands of people came to watch. Grandparents who remembered steam trains from when they were little. Moms and dads holding their children up high to see. Everyone waved and cheered as the biggest steam engine still running anywhere in the world rolled by, whistle blowing, smoke puffing into the sky.
And Big Boy 4014 is still running today, visiting towns all across the country so new boys and girls can see it, hear it, and feel the ground shake as it goes by.
So if you ever hear a deep, low whistle far away, and the ground starts to rumble... you just never know. It might be Big Boy, coming to say hello.
The End