Union Pacific #119

The working replica at the Golden Spike National Historic site, Promontory, Utah, USA. Apparently there are only a couple of minor safety-related changes in this locomotive vs. the original. In particular, it really was this colorful! I tended to think of Victorian locomotives as gray and dull, from all those old grainy b&w's, but at least some of them were downright gaudy.

The straight smokestack shows that this is a coal-burner.

This is the site, in the Utah desert north of the Great Salt Lake, where the original US transcontinental railroad was completed. The Central Pacific built eastward from California, while the Union Pacific built westward from Omaha, Nebraska. The link (the "Golden Spike") was finished on May 10, 1869.

Ironically, this section of the railroad is now abandoned, being bypassed by a shortcut directly across the Great Salt Lake that was built just after the turn of the last century, and the rails were torn up in 1942 and recycled for the war effort! A short section was rebuilt in the 1960s for the historic park so the replicas would have a place to travel.