It had the elements of a nightmare.
Blackness
growing larger
in the eyepiece of my camera
rushing toward me
engulfing the sky
darkening it
obliterating it
consuming me
with its noise
its speed
its wind
its blast of heat
roaring past.
Bob Priddy met Big Boy
that day
And lived to tell the tale.
The railroad crossing in Osage City was crowded with onlookers a few days ago, all waiting for the largest steam locomotive ever built anywhere in the world to pass through on its way to a stop in Jefferson City.
Union Pacific locomotive 4014, the only Big Boy still running, rounded the curve in the distance, its mighty steam whistle bellowing in full-throated bass, warning those near the crossing to stand away. Inconceivable power was coming and coming fast.
And then it blew past, faster than I could turn with it, slightly staggering me with its power, force, and the wind it was pushing outward. And briefly, a ripple of heat reaching out from its boiler to brush my face.
Later, in Jefferson City, as the locomotive rested briefly at the station, too close to the Capitol bluff to be seen from above, I thought it might be visible from the House of Representatives garage, west of the capitol. And there it was, lurking and breathing. And when it began to move, slowly, there was a feeling of menace, of a great beast stalking creatures protected by the barred garage windows as it slowly passed by, seconds later to ease onto a siding with the muscular attitude that it was going to go where it damn well pleased to go and it would be best not to challenge it.
We can be grateful such machines are restricted to tracks and that Transformers are not real.
Walt Whitman, the great American poet, long before Big Boy was even lines drawn on a planning page, felt what I felt when he confronted a locomotive, one of the mechanical marvels of his time:
Thee in thy panoply, thy measur’d dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive, Thy black cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel, Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides,/ Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance,/ Thy great protruding head-light fix’d in front, Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple,/ The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack,/Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels,/ Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily following,/ Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack,/ yet steadily careering;/ Type of the modern—/emblem of motion and power/—pulse of the continent…/Fierce-throated beauty!/ Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music,/ thy swinging lamps at night,/ Thy madly-whistled laughter,/ echoing, rumbling like an earthquake,/rousing all,/ Law of thyself complete,/ thine own track firmly holding,/(No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)/Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return’d,/ Launch’d o’er the prairies wide,/ across the lakes,/ To the free skies unpent/ and glad and strong.
The older generation can dwell for a short time in nostalgia at the appearance of restored steam locomotives. Children often gaze open-mouthed at this great machine, oozing steam and occasional spurts of hot water, as it dozes in front of them. For some, the graceful dance of the slow-moving side rods as the locomotive heads toward its overnight parking place is endlessly fascinating—-as is the pounding rhythm of the same side roads at speed.
The Big Boy and its few smaller kin who still display railroading’s past are far more exciting and, dare we say, romantic than the sanitary and ungainly diesels of today. But their constant need for care and cleaning, their relatively short runs before needing more water and more fuel, and their mechanical makeup are reasons they are now curiosities, not commonplace.
In 1976, when I rode the American Freedom Train from Boonville to Jefferson City, I asked engineer Doyle McCormack if he thought he missed anything by not living in the age of steam. “Yeah,” he said, “a lot of work!”
Let us be glad there are still those willing to do that work. And to bring these great pieces of fierce-throated beauty to us from time to time, glad and strong. -0-