# 844 headed out of Cheyenne



## Stan Cedarleaf (Jan 2, 2008)

UP 844 headed out of Cheyenne today..

  
http://www.railpictures.net/viewpho...amp;nseq=0



http://mikepannell254.fotopic.net/p64026024.html Click on next at the bottom of the screen


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## Jerry Barnes (Jan 2, 2008)

Nice shots Stan, you take those? Looks cool, with all the snow. I plan to shoot it today(Sat) as it comes thru Lexington. I see, on the steam trace, it is still in North Platte, supposed to move out at 8 am. I will be up on the viaduct, want a top view for my build of it, if I ever get started.


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## Stan Cedarleaf (Jan 2, 2008)

No, Jerry. I didn't take them. Wish I would have. They're great. 

I picked them up on the net..


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## Paul Burch (Jan 2, 2008)

Great shots.


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## Jerry Barnes (Jan 2, 2008)

I got my overhead shots, was on my film camera, it will shoot 5 frames rapidly. So will get them back next week.


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## aceinspp (Jan 2, 2008)

Jerry you need to just buy you a digital camera and post them from there instead of waiting. Later RJD


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## Jerry Barnes (Jan 2, 2008)

Well, I have a digital camera RJ. Problem is, it takes a pix, but takes a few seconds before it can take another. My film camera clicks them off like a machine gun.


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## aceinspp (Jan 2, 2008)

Well I'm sure you can get the digital to do the same. Can it take videos? Later RJD


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## Jerry Barnes (Jan 2, 2008)

Yeah, it has taken all the videos I've loaded onto youTube, but wanted stills for my 844 build-if I ever get started! Rounded up about all I need. Just need to start turning the drive wheels, got some Boxpox castings.


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## Jerry McColgan (Feb 8, 2008)

I wonder what happened.

It had been my understanding that Challenger 3985 was going to be making this run. It seems that 844 is replacing the Challenger for the run.

http://www.uprr.com/newsinfo/releas...agle.shtml

Original reports were that the UP Challenger was coming to Arkansas (North Little Rock) April 21 - 22 and was going to be on display at North Little Rock on April 22.

Jerry


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## Jerry Barnes (Jan 2, 2008)

Lynn(the engineer) told me the CHallenger still needs some work done on it, may end up pulling the boiler, so you may not see it for a few years.


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## Jerry McColgan (Feb 8, 2008)

Posted By Jerry Barnes on 05 Apr 2010 09:46 AM 
Lynn(the engineer) told me the CHallenger still needs some work done on it, may end up pulling the boiler, so you may not see it for a few years. 

Hi Jerry,

I was afraid there was something like that happening.

Thanks for the update.

Jerry


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## Jerry McColgan (Feb 8, 2008)

Today's Arkansas Gazette: Romancing the rails Mighty locomotive is steaming into Arkansas in salute to golden age of trains By Ron Wolfe  


http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/...-20100420/


Photo by *Ron Wolfe* 
Union Pacific Locomotive No. 844 shows the stuff it's made of, metal and steam and 66 years of railroad history, including its lead position in such famous, bygone trains as the Overland Limited and the Portland Rose.





LITTLE ROCK — Editor’s note: Union Pacific Steam Locomotive No. 844 is on a tour that will stop in Arkansas from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday behind the Union Pacific office at 1000 W. Fourth St. in North Little Rock. Democrat-Gazette reporter Ron Wolfe met the train in Houston to preview the event.





HOUSTON - Down by the station, early in the morning, machinist Jack Holland lights a couple of oily rags that he throws down the hatch, into the firebox of Union Pacific SteamLocomotive No. 844.


“That’s all it takes,” he says - that plus all the other know-how he needs to wake the 66-year-old locomotive from a night’s rest, its sides still warm to the touch. Before long, the railroad man has built an orange fire made of oil and history, the brightest thing in the dark of morning. The locomotive is gathering steam.


“Now, here’s how we turn on the lights,” Holland says, twisting a valve that looks like a water tap, like a gardener would crank open to sprinkle the grass. But this one shoots steam to the locomotive’s dynamo, which generates the power to light the dials that show steam pressure. The generator thrums, and the airbrakes bang, sucking air. The locomotive is restless.


By morning’s light, fireman Rick Braunschweig is in place on the cab’s left side, in charge of holding the steam pressure to about 300 pounds per square inch. A safety valve will let the steam go if the pressure climbs much above 300. Braunschweig lets it rise on purpose to test the valve.


“Any time now,” the fireman starts to say, when -


Ps-sss-hhhh-SHOOM!


The safety valve works, and looking out the locomotive is like watching from an airplane in the clouds. The locomotive is wide awake, ready to go, feeling rambunctious, and engineer Steve Lee is aboard, seated to lean out the right.


“I’m ready if y’all are,” Lee says.


Burly and bearded, the engineer shoves the lever that will send the locomotive forward. He pulls back the throttle, a two-handed job even for him.


Chuff! The locomotive answers with an impatient snort. Chuff! - what kept you? Chuff! - that all you got? Chuff-chuff! - let’s go - chuffchuff! - roll on - chuff-chuff! - outbound.


Rattle and sway, and hang on the best you can, as the train leaves Houston’s Amtrak station, headed south down the Texas coast, pulling eight cars. People are waving to the train from both sides, people running with cameras, people staring at the train through windshields. They wave from windows, wave from rooftops, from bicycles, and kids wave from their dads’ shoulders.


The train will turn around in Olmito, Texas, about as far south as Texas goes - the farthest south No. 844 has ever gone - sniff the salt air, and start the return stint of The Valley Eagle Heritage Tour that will bring it to Arkansas.


*TIMES AND TRAINS GONE BY*


Shiny black-and-silver No. 844 is the last steam locomotive that Union Pacific ordered built, and no railroader needs to be told it was a passenger engine. Its 80-inch drive wheels tell the story: made for speed in a era when high-speed meant a train that went 60, 70, 80 miles an hour, maybe faster, rocketing past the speediest highway traffic.


It pulled the passenger cars that made up famous trains called the Overland Limited, Los Angeles Limited, the Portland Rose and the Challenger. People traveled in style. They stretched out in recliner seats. They cut into $1.50 steaks in the dining car, careful of the tablecloths. They relaxed in the club car, where the bartender wore a sharp white coat. They tucked into the sleeper car, and the train lulled them to dreams, and they woke up in far-off places.


But steam gave way to more efficient diesel engines. Passenger trains lost to faster ways of travel. Glamour days gone, No. 844 got the grunt job of hauling freight through Nebraska. By 1960, the old locomotive was bound for the scrap heap.


One thing never changed, though, and it’s something even railroaders have trouble explaining, but here’s one to give it a try. Jim Leonard is a retired dispatcher from Cheyenne, Wyo., now a volunteer historian on the Valley Eagle run.


“A diesel engine is a pretty cool, unimpressive piece of machinery,” Leonard says. “A steam engine is a work of art ... a living, breathing thing.”


The steam engine needs water and air. It needs warmth in its veins - fire in its belly. It has quirks and moods, and it doesn’t tell its secrets to just anybody.


To say that No. 844 is the exact same as any other steam engine - like one midpriced sedan resembles another - would be as wrong as to say that boilermaker and welder Scott Turley’s greasy coveralls are the same as new. (Turley buys his work pants the color of black oil to hide the stains, but the burn marks show, anyway.)


Romance! The word can be hard for a man to spout, but steam trains have it. Other companies only try to claim as much with ads that show the Coors Silver Bullet train, and the Toyota Avalon in front of a sleek locomotive. But Union Pacific had the real thing all along, and knew it, and saved the locomotive to become the railroad’s “ambassador of good will.”


No. 844 has run hundreds of thousands of miles since then, showing up just to be seen, to remind people that the railroad is more than a string of cars that tie up traffic at the crossing - the railroad is what people used to live for, and some still do.


*BIG AS TEXAS*


The locomotive’s stop in Houston attracted throngs all day, including 60-year-old railroad buff Norman Riedmuller of nearby Pasedena, in his blue-and-white-striped engineer’s cap.


“It’s so big,” he said. “So big. Not to say that bigger is better, but if Godzilla had been a lizard, he wouldn’t have been as impressive.”


“You have to be careful walking around it,” 10-yearold Anita Hopmann, from downtown Houston’s Trinity Lutheran School, said. “If you breathe in too much steam, it could puff up your lungs.”


(Maybe not, but fireman Braunschweig wouldn’t stick his head in the boiler’s superheated, 600-degree steam to find out.)


Tourists pay Houston chauffeur and guide Michael Zargarov to show them NASA’s Johnson Space Center, but he took himself to admire the old train from behind his handlebar mustache.


“Houston doesn’t do much to preserve history,” Zargarov, 47, said, looking toward the city’s glass-and-glitter skyline. Houston’s Grand Central Station was a monument to train travel, built of limestone and granite as if to last forever, but it didn’t. A train that could have stopped there - well, that’s something to see.


“This ... this must be the locomotive that took me to Los Angeles in 1944,” a watery-eyed man of some years on the planet said to Ed Dickens, who is manager of the railroad’s steam heritage shop in Cheyenne, home to the locomotive and its 11-member crew between tours.


“It could have been,” Dickens, 44, answered.


*STEAMED UP*


Dickens has the springy stride and confident demeanor of a jet pilot, but his passion is steam trains.


He is, according to the fireman, “an immense source of information when it comes to steam.”


“I’ve had an interest in railroads my entire life,” Dickens says, starting with toy trains, and then tourist trains - the narrow-gauge rides in Durango and Silverton, Colo. - building up to No. 844.


Schools don’t teach how to run steam trains. Steam railroad men learn on the job, where they don’t get burned by a bad grade, but they might from a dumb move.


Women on the train, yes - Rick Braunschweig’s wife, Penny, and engineer Lynn Nystrom’s wife, Mary, sell the concessions - but “most women I’ve met don’t have the patience to do this,” Dickens says.


The steam engine comes from a time when nothing was instant, certainly not steam pressure, and least of all gratification. A old-time fireman trained for 10 or 15 years in hopes of becoming an engineer.


But the engineer was in control, finally, of something humongous.


Yesterday’s world bent to accommodate such important movers-and-shakers as Locomotive No. 844 - to cater to the engine’s demands with a water tower every 150 miles along the route, a fuel supply, a steam train shop for regular maintenance, Dickens says.


Water towers have gone the way of the Pony Express, and it’s no milk run to keep a steam locomotive on today’s rails. The yellow cars it pulls might look nostalgic, but they’re mostly full of the least picturesque necessities: welding gear, enormous wrenches, a metal lathe to fix and make train parts along the way, modern office clutter - all the stuff it takes to keep going.


Times change, they do, but then times are flimsy. Studded with rivets, flame edging the firebox, steam curling past the windows, Locomotive No. 844 is something else.


*GOOD MORNING, AMERICA*


Just like Arlo Guthrie sings in “City of New Orleans,” the locomotive rolls past the graveyards of rusted automobiles that were somebody’s dream, sometime, but never a dream that lasted.


It passes the ruins of houses that sagged, businesses that closed, tractors that quit, junk that accumulated, signs all around that time has its way with everything, and here’s what No. 844 has to say about all that:


Whoooo! WHOO! WHOO! Whooo-ooooooo!


Train whistles are signals composed of long and short blasts, generally cautions: Train coming, clear the crossing. And: Watch out, I’m backing up. The engineer toots according to regulations.


The whistle doesn’t sound like a regulation, though, from the open-windowed cab, not when Lee’s big gloved hand grabs the red handle that dangles from a blackened chain, swinging back and forth above him. He gives a yank, and the train howls like a cyclone.


This to you! - is how the message sounds. This to you! - li’l beep-beep ’lectric car over there. How many wide eyed kids ever lined up for a look at you? Pardon my steam, shorty.


This to you! - condos by the railroad track. “ Gentrified,” as they say in this part of Texas. My, what a quaint location. Thought you could get used to the rumble of a train now and then, did you? Well -SURPRISE!


Hey, hey, helll-ooooooooo! - pretty girls with cameras. Let me show you my profile, my best side, don’t you think? I might be your great-grandfather’s train, ladies, but you know and I know, I’m nobody’s great-grandfather.


Listen, and the train seems to call a promise from way, way-way-yyy down the track:


I’ll be around to show your great-grandchildren how it’s done.
*This article was published today at 2:47 a.m. * Style, Pages 29 on 04/20/2010


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## Semper Vaporo (Jan 2, 2008)

Ron Wolfe can write!


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## Stan Cedarleaf (Jan 2, 2008)

That's super, Jerry. A great article and so, so true....


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## Jerry McColgan (Feb 8, 2008)

Posted By Stan Cedarleaf on 20 Apr 2010 02:19 PM 
 That's super, Jerry. A great article and so, so true.... 


Hi Stan,

The funny thing is that I would have missed the article (I only get the Sunday edition) if it had not been for a long time friend who admits to having been born "without the train gene" phoning to let me know about the arrival of 844 and the article. I knew 844 was coming but I would have missed this great article if it had not been for him.

For someone who has no interest in railroads he has a personal family history that includes many relatives who had worked for the railroads plus he has a great memory for many interesting things that happened on the railroads he has no interest in.

We are fortunate to have a newsman who is not only interested in a story about steam locomotives but who has the ability to write such a story that is very likely to have a major impact on the attendance when 844 arrives.

Regards,

Jerry


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## Jerry McColgan (Feb 8, 2008)

I found this story by Ron Wolfe as well:

Train sets whistle-stops in state 

By Ron Wolfe 




LITTLE ROCK — Union Pacific’s “Living Legend,” Steam Locomotive No. 844, will be on display from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday behind the Union Pacific office building at 1000 W. Fourth St. in North Little Rock.


North Little Rock will be the train’s only day-long stop for display in Arkansas - no tours inside the train, but a free chance to see the locomotive, talk with the crew and visit the concessions and souvenir car with its load of T-shirts and train whistles.


The schedule allows for several more opportunities to see the historic locomotive as it chugs through the state. Brief stops and other activities include:


Stop in Texarkana at 10 a.m. Wednesday.


Whistle-stop in Gurdon at noon Wednesday.


Whistle-stop at Little Rock’s Amtrak Station at 2 p.m. Wednesday, en route to arrival in North Little Rock at 4:30 p.m.


Departs North Little Rock at 8 a.m. Friday.


Service stop in Russellville at 10:30 a.m. Friday.


Overnight stop at 1 p.m.Friday in Van Buren.


Departs Van Buren at 8 a.m. Saturday, bound northeast to Wagoner, Okla.


The train will complete its 28-day, 3,500-mile tour April 29 in Cheyenne, Wyo., where Union Pacific collects and maintains historic railroad equipment. A Global Positioning System locates up-to-the-minute where the Valley Eagletrain is on a map on the Union Pacific Web site, up.com. To find the map, type “steam” in the search box.


Another way to catch a glimpse online is at You-Tube.com, where railroad enthusiasts around the country have posted dozens of videos that show the locomotive and its crew in action.
*This article was published today at 2:46 a.m. * 

Style, Pages 34 on 04/20/2010


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## Jerry McColgan (Feb 8, 2008)

And this:

‘Steampunk’ powers new novels By Ron Wolfe 



LITTLE ROCK — Union Pacific Steam Locomotive No. 844 hauls a load of nostalgia for railroad buffs, but also a glimpse of the future that might have been.


“Steampunk” is a growing subgenre of science fiction that imagines how today’s and tomorrow’s world might be if things still ran on steam. Machines, for example, would be big and impressive looking - hissing, clanging - the very look and sound of Locomotive No. 844.


Steampunk is all about “glorious devices,” Nick Gevers writes in the introduction to his anthology, Extraordinary Engines (2008): “Land leviathans! Brass automatrons! Cannon shells fired to the moon!”


William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s Steampunk novel, The Difference Engine (1990), tells how a steampowered computer would have changed everything. Since then, the idea that steam is better is like a vapor that turns up in the oddest places, including:


Datamancer, at data mancer.net, is a shop that builds Steampunk-style, Victorian-looking computers and keyboards out of parts including old typewriter keys.


The spring issue of Haute Handbags magazine touts “Steampunk Belt to Bag,” purses with a brassy attitude, the perfect place to tuck a steam train ticket.


Electronic technology makes things ever more dinky and plastic, but only the huff and puff of steam can run a steam train - or a cappuccino machine.
*This article was published today at 2:46 a.m. * 

Style, Pages 34 on 04/20/2010


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## Jerry McColgan (Feb 8, 2008)

And more still...
An actual workhorse of a locomotive By Ron Wolfe 



LITTLE ROCK — If a steam locomotive is an iron horse, then Union Pacific Steam Locomotive No. 844 is a Clydesdale. Here are the specs on this massive machine that has been plying the rails from Cheyenne, Wyo., and Spokane, Wash., to New Orleans - and North Little Rock - ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt was president and $15 would buy a firstclass train ticket to pretty much anywhere:


Weight: 454 tons


Length of engine and tender: 114 feet


Water capacity: 23,500 gallons


Fuel: 6,200 gallons of No. 5 oil, burned to heat the water


How it works: Boiling water generates 300 pounds per square inch steam pressure. Energy transfers through a system of tubes, cylinders, pistons and rods to the nearly 7-foot-diameter driving wheels.


Speed: 110 mph top speed, about 80 mph as a passenger locomotive in the era of train travel, around 50 mph these days. The locomotive hasn’t lost steam, butthis being Union Pacific’s “ambassador of good will,” the idea is to slow down and give people a chance to see it.
*This article was published today at 2:46 a.m. * 

Style, Pages 34 on 04/20/2010


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