The visits through the area by the ginormous Union Pacific Big Boy steam engine. Well, wasn’t that just grand?
In Pine Bluff, on Saturday afternoon, several hundred people from what appeared to be all over the area gathered at what was the old Pine Bluff train station — now the out-of-commission museum — to watch the behemoth thunder to a stop, with much hissing and whistle-blowing. And it is a whistle, given that it’s steam that is making the noise and not something a car or truck or diesel engine would produce. It was shockingly loud, but a good loud, after hearing thousands of freight train horns across the years with their predictable cadence and tone.
There were no rides or other extravagances. Just the mere presence of the 80-plus-year-old engine was enough for the crowd. The online literature said the public, for safety reasons, was supposed to stand at least 25 feet away from the tracks. As if. People were clustered around the thing as if they were about to climb aboard.
Then on Monday, the beast made a stop in Kingsland, home of Johnny Cash, who lyrically knew his way around a train or two. Again, hundreds flocked to get a glimpse of the largest steam engine ever made.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
The stats on the engine are eye-popping, from its 1.2 million pound weight (three times the weight of an empty 747) to the hundreds of gallons of water it takes to create the necessary steam for even one mile traveled.
A big thank you to Union Pacific, which got the engine out of a museum and put it back on the rails as part of the railroad’s Heartland of America tour. One crewmember said probably a million people had glimpsed the engine while it’s been on tour. Here’s hoping the engine is kept in tip-top shape for years to come.
It all hearkened back to Pine Bluff’s 819. That engine, as well, had been sidelined and then mistreated. It was the last steam engine made by the Cotton Belt Machine Shop in 1942 and ran for 12 years. For the next 25, it sat in Oakland Park where it was forgotten and where time contributed its own insults.
Then volunteers got inspired and worked tirelessly to get it back in operation. That was in 1986. It ran here and there for the next seven years and perhaps is mainly remembered for its annual chug chug to Fordyce for that town’s festival as well as an annual trip to Tyler, Texas.
Then things fell apart, not so much with the engine itself but everything surrounding it, including such things as insurance and permission to run on the tracks where it had operated.
Now, the hurdles seem higher. A man offered on Saturday that his father had been one of the few who had operated the 819 and that he and the other volunteers who had been the driving force behind the renewed 819 were now all deceased. Consequently, it sits in some state of repair or disrepair at the Railroad Museum.
What a shame. The 819 was indeed an exclamation point as a positive representative of Pine Bluff. Children and dignitaries used to crowd the windows of the train cars and wave to hundreds of onlookers that lined the tracks as the trip to Fordyce began. It was like having the Big Boy in our midst all year long.
It would be too easy to suggest the city should have picked up the slack for the operation when the volunteer effort faltered and when the paperwork for its operation got complicated. But cities don’t need to operate trains any more than they need to operate go-kart tracks or movie theaters, ahem, even if the nostalgia of having the 819 on the tracks again takes over the brain ever so briefly.