Train museum photos

Tom took a couple of photos at the National Railroad Museum. The one below is what we call the Edsel train, actually a 1950s GM design for a train called the Aerotrain, which was supposed to compete with automobiles and airplanes. The rear car (they don't have one at the museum) also looks like the back end of an auto. Not a very successful attempt. It looks more like someone's idea of a train for an old Jetsons cartoon show. They were only used for about a decade. It turned out that it did not provide a smooth ride but a very bumpy one. Disney ran a miniature version called the Viewliner at Disneyland for a couple of years, billed as the "fastest miniature train in the world."

This is me sitting in the cab of the Big Boy -- the largest steam locomotive ever built. I think you could get one of the R&GN locomotives inside the cab of the Big Boy.


You can't tell all that much from this shot, but the train itself is GINORMOUS! Measuring 132’ 9 7/8” long – nearly half a football field (about 42.67 m) – it’s easy to see why the Union Pacific Big Boys are the world’s largest steam locomotives. Weighing in at 1.1 million pounds, Big Boy could consume 20 tons of coal in an hour and move at 70 m.p.h. However, it took an army of machinists, pipe fitters and maintenance workers to keep this behemoth on the road. Built in the early 1940s to cope with steep grades in Utah and Wyoming, the last commercial run of a Big Boy was in 1959.

And I'm not wearing my R&GN engineer's cap in those pictures. That is a Stewards of the Dells baseball cap.