(The Associated Press distributed the following article by Tom Parsons on February 8.)
ABOARD LOCOMOTIVE 3985 — When Steve Lee drives by, cattle stampede, deer run for their lives, fish jump from the water, children grin and gape and grownups wave.
It’s not the force of Lee’s personality that changes the world as he moves through it, but rather what he’s driving — a million-pound steam locomotive that shakes the ground as its 12 drive wheels churn along the rails.
Lee, 53, of Cheyenne, is the engineer who operates Challenger, locomotive No. 3985 of the Union Pacific Railroad, the largest steam locomotive still operating in the world.
In the cab with Lee is Lynn Nystrom, 62, also a fully qualified engineer, who acts as fireman when the Challenger is on the rails. He watches the gauges, making sure the flames are getting enough fuel and are hot enough to produce the steam that drives the wheels.
“He’s making the steam,” Lee said, with a nod at Nystrom, “and I’m using it.”
Challenger passed through southwest Arkansas on Wednesday on its way to an overnight stop at North Little Rock. The locomotive, which is based at Cheyenne, is on a nine-state, month-long excursion from Wyoming to Houston and back. At Houston, it was on display during the run-up to the Super Bowl.
At every stop — for a half-hour at Hope, 10 minutes at Arkadelphia — crowds gathered to see the working relic of a bygone era. And where the train didn’t stop, onlookers gathered along the rail line, grinning and waving at the occupants of the locomotive’s cab as it sped by.
“It made me think of the good old days,” said Don Walthall, 69, of Magnolia, who drove nearly an hour to Hope to see once again something that had been common during his youth.
“There used to be three or four trains (with steam locomotives) a day passing about a mile-and-a-half from my home,” he recalled.
Among the crowd of a thousand or more that gathered at Hope, hundreds of grade-school youngsters dismounted from yellow buses to brave mid-30s temperatures during the wait for Challenger’s arrival. As the locomotive approached from the south, belching steam and gray smoke from burning No. 5 fuel oil and issuing long blasts on its mournful whistle, the students stood on tiptoe to catch a glimpse of it in the distance.
“I can see it. I see its light!” a fourth-grader called out to her teacher.
As the huge engine, 122 feet long, inched to a stop, it drew a simple exclamation from a boy standing on the gravel railbed, 15 feet back from the tracks: “Wow!”
Built in 1943 at the American Locomotive Co. in Schenectady, N.Y., Challenger was retired in 1962 and stored in a roundhouse at Cheyenne until it became part of an outdoor display near that city’s depot in 1975. A group of Union Pacific employees undertook a restoration that took several years, getting the locomotive back in running order again in 1981.
Wednesday, the engine pulled seven cars behind it at speeds that reached 60 mph through the rolling countryside. Cattle in track-side pastures, accustomed to diesel locomotives, turned and ran from the chugging engine, and a group of four deer bolted and sped away, flag-tails flying. Horses shied and galloped off, and fish in water-filled sloughs along the track, apparently spooked by the vibration of the ground, cleared the surface of the water in agitated jumps.
Challenger is actually the name that was originally applied to a whole class of locomotives, 105 in all, built for the railroad. They were built to haul freight, not having enough speed to pull passenger trains.
“The only reason it was built was World War II,” Lee said. “There was a huge demand for transportation.”
Diesel-electric locomotives were already in use by that time, Lee said, but the government reserved the manufacture of diesel engines for submarines and trucks.
No. 3985 is one of two steam locomotives still operated by Union Pacific, but both are strictly for show, for nostalgia.
In the cab with Lee and Nystrom were two UP railroaders who would normally have been mounted in the cab of a diesel locomotive. Joe Cromwell, 57, an engineer from Pine Bluff, and John Nelson, a conductor who lives at North Little Rock, are accustomed to making the run from Longview, Texas, to North Little Rock, and were assigned by the railroad to fill Lee and Nystrom in on the details of the run.
It was the first time Cromwell had set foot in a steam locomotive.
Steam and smoke flew by the cab’s open windows. Despite the cold outside, the cab was toasty warm. Black paint on the machinery provides a background for red-painted, wheel-shaped handles in front of Nystrom, each labeled: blower, tank heater, tank blowback, burner blowback, atomizer.
Lee’s title is manager of train operating practices in UP’s executive department, but his main job is running the steam program, duties that were thrust upon him in 1982, the year after Challenger made its first run after restoration.
He’s been with Union Pacific for 24 years, and has been a railroader for 32 years. But he says he’s not a steam buff — driving a steam-driven locomotive is just his job.
That’s not the case with Nystrom, however. He was part of the original group of about 45 people who worked to restore Challenger. His explanation of what drew him to that task is short and to the point: “To see something this big run.”