Big Boy

 

This morning as Travalon and I were heading out, we heard the train at the crossing by our house. Sure enough, we could see it passing by, just a little train with a few cars. It seemed like a good omen. We drove to Janesville and stopped at the Menards there to get a new camping chair for me, since my old one had kind of died during our last trip to Rochelle a couple of weekends ago. Travalon said his was getting old too, so we got two - they're only $8 each and there's even a rebate (that you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get, and then it's just store credit). Then we took a bunch of back roads to Malta, Illinois to avoid the traffic going to Rochelle. The last time the Big Boy came through, there were tens of thousands of people who flocked to the Railroad Park, and traffic was allegedly horrible.

In Malta we had lunch at a Mexican restaurant in a gas station, really authentic tamales (for me) and a quesadilla (for Travalon) and street corn (for both of us). Then we found the Lions Park, which had bathrooms and just about the only shade in town, where we hung out until about three, when we headed toward the tracks. There was a wide lawn area in front of the tracks, and a local couple around my age and her mother were standing under the shade of the single tree in the area, so we asked if we could share their shade. They said sure, so we set up our camping chairs and chatted with the family, which also included a couple of teenagers, one of each gender. We saw lots of drones flying overhead, and these two planes.

Remember them - they'll show up later in the video. More and more people began to gather, so it was like Benton when we went to see the solar eclipse - enough people to make it festive, but not a horribly large crowd. We kept seeing very long trains go by, and we hoped one wouldn't be passing on the closer track while the Big Boy passed on the further track.

The Union Pacific Big Boy is one of twenty-five colossal steam engines built in the 1940's to haul heavy war freight. It's currently the only one still running, and it apparently weighs 1.2 million pounds. (I'm getting this from Google AI, so feel free to double-check these statistics.) It is going coast to coast as part of the country's 250th birthday celebrations, and Travalon said it would be towing red, white, and blue cars and a caboose. Today it was supposed to get to Rochelle around three and stay there fifteen minutes, then head toward DeKalb with an ETA of 3:30. Travalon was tracking it, so we knew it was running about an hour late. I ran to the Historical Society to use their bathroom, and even though it was one stall for women, I didn't have to wait in line. (Though there was a line when I came out.) Meanwhile another train was passing by, and this one had the most beautiful graffiti ever, but unfortunately neither Travalon nor I got photos or videos, since the previous trains had been the kinds with double-decker cargo boxes that don't tend to have graffiti. We knew, from running into some Union Pacific employees at lunch, that Big Boy would be blowing by at 70 mph, so I shuddered watching kids (and adults) on the track. Finally we could hear the unique whistle sound, and Travalon and I got videos. Here is mine - you can see me flinch from the sound.

Big Boy is VERY big and VERY loud, and I forgot my earplugs in the car, but as the husband of the family we were hanging out with said, "The sound is part of the experience." You can see the wife in this video saying how loud it is, and you can also see the two planes pictured above, which had flown to the west before Big Boy came and then reappeared, following him to the east. I will edit Travalon's version and put it on YouTube with a link here soon. As you can see, there are no red, white, and blue train cars, nor is there a caboose. But it was still extremely cool. And loud.

After that we went to Rochelle, figuring the Railroad Park had cleared out quickly once Big Boy had left. To our surprise, an older couple asked us if the "big train" had already passed. This was an hour after it had been in Rochelle, and it was already an hour late, remember, so they were WAY late. We saw one very long, slow train start to go by, and I took some graffiti photos.

Then it stopped and started to back up even more slowly. A guy from Milwaukee told us there was a road that ends in a circle from which you can see the railyard, so we set off to find that and saw the slowly backing up train was holding up an even longer train with four engines, so we couldn't see much beyond the stopped train, but it did have one good piece of graffiti.

Here's a closer look.

Then we drove to Rockford and had dinner at what we thought was a Japanese restaurant, but they didn't have a public bathroom so first we had to go to the gas station next door, so then we had to buy some beverages there. The people running the restaurant were actually Indonesian, and when I asked for the hot sauce and explained my grad school roommate from Surabaya had introduced me to it, they said they were from Surabaya! Not that huge a coincidence, it's the second-largest city there after Jakarta, but we started chatting about Indonesian cuisine, and it turns out they had a dessert my old roommate used to make with tapioca and coconut milk and fresh fruit, so we had to get it. So delicious! And I still have half my coconut rice with fried chicken for lunch tomorrow. It was a fun way to end our adventure.

Famous Hat