It’s hard to put into words the feeling of being the only person for miles around listening to a steam engine’s whistle echo through the mountains and across the desert plains. The first faint whistle comes nearly forty-five minutes before it passes by, leaving you plenty of time to imagine life on the frontier when the train was your only connection to the outside world. Before long, Big Boy rumbles past and the massive steam engine disappears back into the vast West Texas landscape and all falls silent.

Photographed in November, 2019, between the ghost town of Finlay, Texas, once depicted by Dorothea Lange, and Sierra Blanca, Texas, the completion site of the Southern Transcontinental Railroad in 1881.

Union Pacific 4014 heads into Paisano Pass, Texas. At this site on July 8th, 1921 a train engineer for the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio Railway was believed to have been murdered at Paisano Pass. Lore has it that William Bohlman was operating locomotive 745 while suffering a gunshot wound to the head. The steam engine subsequently derailed and the boiler exploded. To this day no one knows the reason behind the possible murder or cause of the locomotive explosion.

Union Pacific 4014 races across the high desert between Marathon and Sanderson, Texas. It’s hard to grasp the sheer size of Big Boy as it passes over a wash just feet away.

It seemed as if everyone for miles around Alpine came out to see Union Pacific 4014 roll into town.

Justin Hamel – Photographs and text Copyright 2020