First Union Pacific Big Boy locomotive to move under its own power in almost 60 years

[CMNTMXR57]

You can see this tender attached to Challenger 3985 when it came to West Chicago 15, 20 years or so ago...

 

[Omicron]

What differences were/ are there between the challenger tender and the big boy tender?

 

[CMNTMXR57]

Water capacity (for the boiler) essentially.

Big Boy: 25,000 gallons
Challenger: 24,000 gallons

Both were 7 axle units and looked identical.

 

[zenriddles]

Nobody knows for sure as far as I know. Perhaps it got scrapped with one of the ones that were scrapped.

Damn.

 

[CMNTMXR57]

And to further add, I recall reading somewhere that it consumed around 12,000 - 13,000 gallons of that water per hour while running in service (not sitting around idling) and could burn 44,000 pounds of it's 56,000 pound coal capacity every hour. So every ~hour it had to stop and get more coal and refill the tender with water.

Seems tedious, but they were primarily used to get over the mountains between Utah and Wyoming. So it wasn't like it was pulling from L.A. to Chicago and needed to stop every hour - hour and a half to fill up.

 

[CMNTMXR57]

Cruising the city website just now, seeing if they posted anything in regards to the PoPo activity in front of my house this morning, came across this on their instagram page.

35 years separates these two. The Big Boy made in 1943 and that F-40PH around 1978.

 

[Mr_Roboto]

And to further add, I recall reading somewhere that it consumed around 12,000 - 13,000 gallons of that water per hour while running in service (not sitting around idling) and could burn 44,000 pounds of it's 56,000 pound coal capacity every hour. So every ~hour it had to stop and get more coal and refill the tender with water.

Seems tedious, but they were primarily used to get over the mountains between Utah and Wyoming. So it wasn't like it was pulling from L.A. to Chicago and needed to stop every hour - hour and a half to fill up.

Yeah but you'd probably be idling that thing along anywhere that was fairly flat.

 

[CMNTMXR57]

Once moving...

Despite all it's stats... Lots of rated HP, size, etc... With a 4% Adhesion rate, it only has something like a 135,000 lb/ft of starting drawbar force/tractive effort, which would be much less once rolling.

By way of comparison, some of the modern day diesel electrics, like EMD SD70's and SD90's, as well as GE EVO series locomotives, are upwords of 180,000 - 225,000 lb/ft of starting tractive effort/drawbar force depending on model/engine/truck type/etc....