Posted in UP "Big Boys" & "Challengers" & 4-8-4s! on October 28, 2009| Leave a Comment »
by Emmett Smith
UNION Pacific RR Traindriver Magly Wook (a remote cousin of Old New England Engineman Preserved Wook, of the disgraced Minnesota Wooks): “Al…Gore? Nope, never heard of him. Guess you got me on that one, son…I don’t believe I’d know the sonofabitch FROM (more…)
Posted in UP "Big Boys" & "Challengers" & 4-8-4s! on October 25, 2009| Leave a Comment »
by Engineman Wook
Here is a picture of the keyboard at the backhead of a Union Pacific “Big Boy” locomotive!
And if you click on this UP “Big Boy” #4014 backhead link below, you can use a cursor to identify various buttons:
http://www.trainweb.org/rlhs/collection/UP_locomotives/4014_BackHead_mapped.htm
[Engineman Wook all text-rights reserved 5 March 2009]
Posted in UP "Big Boys" & "Challengers" & 4-8-4s! on October 23, 2009| 1 Comment »
by Engineman Wook
More pictures like this can be found at www.cbu.edu/~mcondren/UP-844/UP-844%20048-700.jpg
Skip Weythman (who in fact did NOT take the above picture!) is a video photographer who chases and films steam trains like some people hound down the highway after tornadoes! Below are as many of his clips from YouTube, of footage of Union Pacific 4-8-8-4 Northern (more…)
Posted in UP "Big Boys" & "Challengers" & 4-8-4s! on October 23, 2009| Leave a Comment »
by Engineman Preserved Wook
This an expanded selection of moving picture and still footage available on YouTube, of the Union Pacific RR Big Boy (more…)
Posted in UP "Big Boys" & "Challengers" & 4-8-4s! on October 22, 2009| Leave a Comment »
by Preserved Wook
To anyone who grew up on the American prairie or high plains in the twentieth century, the song of the meadowlark recalls what we have lost in the name of what we have (more…)
Posted in UP "Big Boys" & "Challengers" & 4-8-4s! on October 22, 2009| Leave a Comment »
by Preserved Wook
Railfan Skip Weythman is right up there with the devoted people who chase tornadoes!
This long take of UP Northern 844 pulling the “Sooner Rocket” was made from a speeding (more…)
Posted in UP "Big Boys" & "Challengers" & 4-8-4s! on October 22, 2009| Leave a Comment »
by Emmett Smith
Here are YouTube clips from two fine pieces of digital work, by Skip Weythman. The first is an extended take, of UP Northern 844, with her “Corn Belt Rocket” drag, hurtling eastbound in 2007 from Cheyenne to Sydney, NB, right down my old BN tie gang #978 Summer, 1979, hammer grounds:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqHtCYS0kU0
And here is UP Challenger 3985, at 70 miles per too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP1_4ymsIig&feature=related
The interesting feature is (more…)
Posted in UP "Big Boys" & "Challengers" & 4-8-4s! on October 22, 2009| Leave a Comment »
by Preserved Wook
These particular YouTube video links are only a small sample of what you will find when you get there and start searching the sidebar menus.
As far as I am concerned, these locomotives, together with Belgian horses, children and cats, and meadowlarks, is what America is all about — with a few old Rumley Oil Pull and John Deere tractors thrown in for good measure — and apart from the occasional gardener snake or salamander, everything else is just scenery, or else it is outright lies….
1) This first link is to (more…)
Posted in UP "Big Boys" & "Challengers" & 4-8-4s! on October 21, 2009| Leave a Comment »
©2004 Richard Leonard
The picture above of one of the largest and most powerful steam locomotives ever built tells its own tale. It is coal-fired Union Pacific Big Boy [4-8-8-4] locomotive No. 4007 departing Laramie, Wyoming, August 17, 1957. It shows in a way that words alone cannot how far behind us now the late-modern is. That oldtime age indeed ended in November of 1989 with the pulling down of the wall in Berlin, only thirty-two years after the picture above was made. And now, fifty-one years on, we only need look around us, away from our overheated PC monitors and out of the window, to see for ourselves that these are no longer modern days.
Seeing is believing, and the following online archive complied by Richard Leonard is decisive:
[Engineman Wook all text-rights reserved 3 December 2008]
Engineman Wook 
