You’ve got to admire Union Pacific’s steam program. I’ve been reading about it my entire life. There’s the 844 (or as we once knew it, the 8444), the 3985, and then the 4014. Big mainline locomotives, each of them, operating for the very same railroad they were built for. What’s not to love? But Union Pacific, historically speaking, never came closer to me than Omaha (and later, Chicago). Those locomotives might as well be operating on a different planet.

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