This is what trains were all about

Huge Big Boy steam locomotive coming back to life - Yahoo News

"'Something that's so large and powerful and magnificent, we didn't think any of them would ever come back,' he said."

Back in the 1940’s when I was a pretty little guy we lived in a Chicago suburb (Downers Grove) and my Dad commuted to his job in Cicero on a train, the old Burlington line, and the train was pulled by a steam engine. It was not nearly as big as this one but for a little guy it was efreakingnormous and astoundingly, gloriously loud. I used to love going to the station with my Mom to meet Dad. 

It was also dirty, this engine, because it made a lot of smoke (which was where the choo-choo came from). In the days before air conditioning the passengers would open the windows in the cars and the people who had window seats would often rest elbows on the sills. I could tell if my Dad had had a window seat because if he had, one elbow of his white shirt would be black. 

A decade or so later I traveled on a train from northern Minnesota to southern California and back and the big steam engines that hauled us over the mountains made the commuter-train engines look like dwarfs. Possibly one of those engines was this very Big Boy. But on the flat, relatively easy pull across, say, Nebraska, we traveled behind a diesel. Diesel engines were OK—quieter, cleaner, faster— but they didn’t look like real engines. Only the steam engines looked like real engines. Still do.