Trainspotting Railroad history meets railroading's present and future in Wyoming. By Claire Walter
Steam Locomotive at the UP Rail Yards in Cheyenne
Wyoming's place in railroad history is secure, and the opportunities for watching trains and train crews in action are legion. Southern Wyoming's development is linked with the Union Pacific Railroad. It laid tracks westward across the state in 1867 and '68 in a race to build the first transcontinental railroad. Settlements sprang up virtually overnight to house legions of workers. Some were abandoned. Others became permanent communities.
Cheyenne, now the state capital, was never a primitive railroad camp but was built almost overnight as a grandiose and sophisticated city. The domed capitol and the splendidly steepled Romanesque-style train depot, built in 1886, instantly became and still remain landmarks. The new Cheyenne Depot Museum is housed in the beautifully restored depot. While there is no longer passenger service, freight trains pass by frequently, and rail fans linger on the overpass to gaze at the UP's massive rail yards and roundhouse. Its shop houses Steam Locomotive 844, the last steam engine built for the line. To arrange a visit, call 307-778-3339.
Old Train Depot Ryan Conway
No special arrangements are necessary to see one of the largest, most powerful locomotives ever built. Big Boy 4004 - 132 feet long, weighing 600 tons and capable of pulling a 5˝-mile-long train - is permanently located in Holliday Park, nine blocks from the depot. Of the 25 Big Boys that were made, only eight are on display somewhere in the country. Big Boys were built between 1941 and 1944 to climb Sherman Hill between Cheyenne and Laramie, and the last of these behemoths were retired in 1962.
Towns grew up as fast as workers could lay westward to Laramie, Rawlins, Rock Springs and Evanston. Elsewhere in the state, smaller lines were also built. Nine historic Wyoming depots are now museums - railroad and otherwise. Green River in the southwestern corner boasts the second pedestrian overpass across both the busy Union Pacific rail yard and the 1910 depot, now used for offices.
Interstate 80 parallels the Union Pacific route between Pine
1242 Engine in Cheyenne Ryan Conway
Bluffs and Evanston, providing ample opportunity to watch beef freight trains making their way across the prairie, the high desert and the mountains. While the Union Pacific is the dominant east/west railroad, BNSF is the main north/south line. Between them, they haul the more than 400 million tons of low-sulfur coal produced annually in Wyoming, the nation's number-one coal state, to the nation's hungry electricity-generating plants. Roughly a quarter of this output comes from ten huge mines in the Powder River Basin, south of Gillette. The UP and BNSF jointly own the rail line out of the coalfields, parallel to Highway 59 and are rapidly laying more tracks to keep up with the demand for coal. When the trains, each up to 1˝ mile long, reach the North Platte River, the tracks split. Gillette, founded in 1891, was named after Edward Gillette, a railroad surveyor and engineer. If he were around today, he'd surely find work on the new tracks.
Wyoming may be one of the newer states (became the 44th state in 1890), but the land within its borders can take you back millions of years, revealing long-extinct animals and the beginnings of mountain ranges. read more
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