Big Boy Scrapping Dates?

Personally, I really doubt that date. I'll go up to the library and see what I can find out, and get back to you.

EDIT:

OK, listed below are the scrap dates for those 4000s that were indeed scrapped.

4000 scrapped 11-17-1961

4001              11-21-1961

4002                2-08-1962

4003                5-31-1963

4004

4005

4006

4007                10-31-1961

4008                  8-07-1962

4009                  5-16-1963

4010                  5-24-1963

4011                  6-14-1963

4012

4013                  4-23-1963

4014

4015                  9-20-1961

4016                  3-09-1962

4017 

4018

4019                  2-21-1962

4020                  5-24-1963

4021                  8-31-1962

4022                 12-31-1962

4023

4024                 10-13-1962

Hope this helps.

In his excellent book, Big Boy, William Kratville goes through engine by engine 4000-4024 and lists the mileage at retirement and date of retirement.  The 4000 is the only locomotive that he includes a scrap date for (scrapped Cheyenne, 1961).  The other Big Boys with road numbers ending in "0" were both retired in July 1962.  It seems unlikely (to me at least) that a 4000 class locomotive sat around for ten years after being stricken from the roster before getting cut up.  I would think a locomotive with as much notoriety as a Big Boy awaiting scrapping for that long would have been well-documented and photographed.

Nevertheless, that is a great photo you've posted.

HW, where did you find this info?  I'm wondering if there is a book out there that I need to add to my Big Boy library!

This information, and much more, is in the book "BIG BOY PORTRAITS". That book was available both as a hard cover and a soft cover.

Sad to say, but as I understand it most of Geneva's output went to sheet metal for the canning industry.

Thanks everyone.  I looks like the date on the back of the print refers to something else, perhaps when the previous owner acquired the print. 

Don, the photos you linked to appear to be of the same locomotive in the same spot as in my print.  The right side smoke deflector is partially up, the drivers are in the same position (allowing for 90 degrees out), and the cab hatch is raised in both yours and my photos.

"Geneva's output went to sheet metal for the canning industry"

WOW that would be a lot of cans!

It would be possible to make a full size replica of the Big Boy using empty steel cans cut and bent into shape.

Andrew

You think this locomotive was special? Think again. It was a dump truck, or a Greyhound bus of the times. To 99% of people who saw them, nothing but a piece of machinery built to do a job.

We see trains, and think they should be preserved. The rest of the public saw them as we today see dump trucks or Caterpillar tractors or buses. Do you really think they should be preserved? Of course not.

The bus and Cat and dump truck fans among us would be horrified.

The Geneva steel plant put out coil and wire. A good deal of it was shipped via WP and SN to the US Steel plant in Pittsburg, California.  Some of the steel may have been rerolled in to sheet, but the plants I am familiar with in Pittsburg made pipe and nails. I believe some of the steel may have go to automobile manufacturing.  The unit train of steel ran two or three times a week.

At a large canning plant, like Campbell Soup in Sacrament, as I recall they only got about two carloads of tinplate a week.  It arrived in insulated 100 ton boxcars from the east.  

It was coil steel from the Geneva Works that collapsed the Sacramento Northern's Lisbon  trestle (1960?) with the electric freight train on it.

Having no need for it, I have posted this print on EBay if anyone is interested. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISA...mp;item=291082117008

Yeah, I do think this locomotive was special.  For a time, there was a program called Big Boy on national television in the 1950s.  The UP Big Boy was featured in a 1945 story in Time magazine.  The class was widely known in the 1950s and 1960s as the worlds largest steam locomotive (admittedly what constitutes 'largest' can be debated).  This widespread perception prevails today, explaining why the remaining Big Boys are the star attractions of the museums lucky enough to count one in their collections.    A Union Pacific Big Boy sitting in a scrap line until 1972 would undoubtedly have attracted the attention of, at a minimum, the railfan community.  There are photos of N&W A-class articulateds awaiting scrapping in Cincinnati in 1964.  There are photos of Southern PS4 1401 in storage before its entombment in the Smithsonian.  Neither of these classes were as well known in the public mind as the UP 4000, and yet we have photo documentation of them well after their active careers had ended.