Thursday, September 24, 2026 Forney Museum of Transportation - Big Boy 4005
We just did a very quick skim of this large museum! There are over 800 artifacts in it and it was started over 70 years ago! Big Boy 4005 is the largest and most dramatic by far. Martin didn’t have time to check the shots and reshoot bad ones, so several shots couldn’t be used.
This is a big page, you’ll have to scroll down a long way to see everything. This just had to be split into two pages, this one concentrating on Big Boy and a second one a very quick skim of a few of the other artifacts.
Here’s a shot from close to the entry. There’s Big Boy at the back(you can see the 400 part of his number) and Martin didn’t notice that its cropped just a bit on the right side, you can’t quite see all of the tender. As you can see, there’s a lot more here than just the Big Boy!
They commision quite a bit of custom artwork. This is a neat overview that applies to almost all steam engines. Once you’re past the transcontinental railroad era, the designs came to be very similar.
We didn’t make time for the gift shop, that drawing is available there, so this 48 megapixel image is the best we’ve got. Clicking on the image will download a 10.8 MB jpg.
The museum had this playing on a loop in front of Big Boy. Wow, what an amazing feat of 3D animated modeling using, horror of horrors, Blender. Yep, Animagraffs used Blender to create this. It goes into every detail of this locomotive. This is a youtube embedded video, so it might see some of youtube’s ads. Martin calls them bugs in youtube’s software.
Martin did one 3D model with Blender and if he has to do another one, he’s going to pay for the much more professional and easier to use Solidworks. Martin and Blender’s user interface did not get along well!
Yipes!!! These monsters are not easy to operate. This is why there are both a fireman and an engineer. The engineer sat on the right, the fireman on the left. Click on the image to download the full 48 MP jpg. The 3D animation goes into more detail. For example, the unlabel yellow triangle at the right is the emergency reverser steam control.
This is the firebox, shot through the open fire door. At the top is the rearmost circulation tube. The floor is where most of the combustion air comes in. At the bottom center is where the automated stoker pushes the coal in. That dark metal is a flap that won’t let any coal go back into the stoker. Not visible are the steam jets that blow the coal to various locations in the fire box.
Here’s Bill standing next to the back piston on the right side. The top of this is the steam valve and the bottom is the piston. Big Boy has 4 pistons.
On the driver wheel to Bill’s right is a label pointing out where you can see the Articulation Connection Pocket. Martin just couldn’t get a shot that showed the pin that connects the front and back parts of the frames.
Here’s the right front cylinder, which is far enough away from the connecting rod to let you see the small steam valve rod on top and the much larger piston rod on the bottom.