The Last Steam Train

OK – so I wasn’t expecting much when I heard that the “last steam train” would be stopping in Gerlach for a half hour. I figured it would a cute, red, wood-burning, Old West-y looking thing that would amble into town, get some water, and wander up the tracks with a few toot-toots.

Boy was I wrong.

The “last steam train” was, well, one of the last steam trains ever manufactured: a massive, brutish, jet black contraption straight out of Atlas Shrugged. A quintessential piece of wondrous dead-tech somehow dropped into our world from the pages of a steampunk novel, it’s powered by boiling massive amounts of water using – wait for it – diesel fuel! Instead of actually burning the diesel in an internal combustion engine, it uses it to create stream in an external combustion engine in a marvelous display of over-engineering.

The wonderful thing was obsolete before it even left the factory floor.

Have a look at the pictures above to get an idea of the sheer size of the thing.