This year is the 118th for its world famous 'Frontier Days'. Not unlike the 'Greeley Colorado Stampede' held last week that we saw part of, but much bigger. And we'll be in Colorado Springs by the time this rodeo week rolls around. :(
Cheyenne also has schools of many kinds, an air force base, oil refining...
...and this is the capitol city of the state with a beautiful building and grounds to mark this honor. But more than beautiful, its PERSONAL. The governor's office is on the first floor lobby and all the doors, when I was there, were wide open. More importantly, as I asked at the visitor's desk, there is not and never has been any kind of entrance security to any government building in the state of Wyoming.
Brings to mind our visit to Harrisburg, PA's capitol building in Harrisburg earlier this year. Guards and magnetic gates at every door. Perhaps you have entered an east coast courthouse, museum, or public toilet recently and can relate to my surprise here in Cheyenne. But the hostess said simply that we've never had a problem and pray we never will.
Downtown Cheyenne is a blend of modern small businesses and restored or being restored hotels and theaters. And everywhere we looked 'Frontier Days' was being promoted like Cheyenne was the site of a world Olympic venue.
But everything about Cheyenne revolves around something much bigger than politics, rodeos, or historic shopping areas. THE RAILROAD.
For the modern tourist the reality of this being a railroad town more than anything else begins at the 120 year old passenger station.
Passenger service was officially stopped through Cheyenne in 1979. but Juvy, the more than helpful manager of the museum and museum store inside the wonderfully restored old station, who wanted no part of a photo but said I could use her name, told me a wonderful story. Juvy told me that last year, when those horrible floods hit Colorado's front Range transcontinental passenger trains could not get from the east to Denver so trains once more stopped at the Cheyenne station where the passenger's debarked and took buses for Denver to pick up the rest of their trek.
Cheyenne, Wyoming is also the home of the Union Pacific Railroad's western transfer and maintenance yards. This is a town that got it's start as a railroad construction city. These camps were called 'Hell on Wheels' by Christian missionaries who tried in vain to remove the liquor and the prostitutes from the camps that sprang up with and after the railroad came through. It is here that AMC Television got the idea for its gritty and very fictional series about the building of the Union Pacific Railroad after the Civil War.
In the wonderful Station Museum you learn well displayed the real story of William Durant's UP and its demanding push west, and of the 'gandy dancers' who made the rails rock. The term for track laying crews seems to come from the fact that they had to 'dance' together in an intricate choreography to pick up and lay safely the thousands upon thousands of heavy rails and the 'gandy' was an iron pole used to set the track in line.
From the 1870's until the end of the century Cheyenne, more than any other railroad town in the west, grew with the Union Pacific. The yards photographed from a plane in the early twentieth century attest to that fact. The roundhouse, one of the biggest in the world, still has one small section remaining that dwarfs the rest of the buildings in the yards today.
The museum does a very good job in defining the change in railroading that took place all over the world when, after WW 2, the diesel was proven to be so much more efficient than the steam engine. Thousands of working steam engines were scrapped by all US railroads and for the UP, Cheyenne was were they were torn down. Then passenger service was replaced by cars, buses and airplanes and it looked for several decades like the train itself would become extinct. But the manufacturers and retailers of America knew better. Nothing hauls bulk freight cheaper or faster than a well run railroad.
Tonight Mona and I are once again sleeping within a short distance of a gentle reminder of the importance of America's railroads. Durant's old Union Pacific rolls freight about 1/4 mile to our south, east and west, about every 15 minutes. The diesels are smooth running and compared to the noise their predecessors made almost silent. Only the rocking of the hundreds of cars per train on their welded rails make a sort of white noise as they pass.
But the reminders of the old and new of the UP remain in Cheyenne in two very important places. One is the station itself, which still has the massive yards working outside its doors every day.
And just a few blocks away, in a quiet park which surrounds Minnehaha lake, sits the last symbol of steam railroad power.This is BIG BOY number 4004. Only a few of these massive engines remain on display in the world. One that I know of is still running out of its museum yard near Scranton, PA. They are hard to keep running. They eat coal like I eat ice cream and they are so long they cannot be used on most track because they cannot make the turns built for shorter engines.
But just standing beside old 4004 makes one realize the awesome power of the train. And last evening, as we were pulling out of a pizza shop after a light (?) supper south of Longmont, Colorado, I found myself being reminded of just that. I raced a UP diesel pulling about 20 cars along the highway at a heady 10 miles an hour.
There were no cars on the road so I kept with the engines cab. The engineer saw us and waved and then I got the same thrill a kid gets when he raises his hand and jerks his fist to get a trucker to blow his horn.
Only the engineer did it just because we were there.
He waved again and smiled as I tooted our CRV's honker at him. Oh how I wished at that moment we were in the coach and I could have answered with a blast on our dual electric air horns! I think he might have actually heard them!
-Ken
Downtown Cheyenne is a blend of modern small businesses and restored or being restored hotels and theaters. And everywhere we looked 'Frontier Days' was being promoted like Cheyenne was the site of a world Olympic venue.
But everything about Cheyenne revolves around something much bigger than politics, rodeos, or historic shopping areas. THE RAILROAD.For the modern tourist the reality of this being a railroad town more than anything else begins at the 120 year old passenger station.
Passenger service was officially stopped through Cheyenne in 1979. but Juvy, the more than helpful manager of the museum and museum store inside the wonderfully restored old station, who wanted no part of a photo but said I could use her name, told me a wonderful story. Juvy told me that last year, when those horrible floods hit Colorado's front Range transcontinental passenger trains could not get from the east to Denver so trains once more stopped at the Cheyenne station where the passenger's debarked and took buses for Denver to pick up the rest of their trek.
In the wonderful Station Museum you learn well displayed the real story of William Durant's UP and its demanding push west, and of the 'gandy dancers' who made the rails rock. The term for track laying crews seems to come from the fact that they had to 'dance' together in an intricate choreography to pick up and lay safely the thousands upon thousands of heavy rails and the 'gandy' was an iron pole used to set the track in line.From the 1870's until the end of the century Cheyenne, more than any other railroad town in the west, grew with the Union Pacific. The yards photographed from a plane in the early twentieth century attest to that fact. The roundhouse, one of the biggest in the world, still has one small section remaining that dwarfs the rest of the buildings in the yards today.The museum does a very good job in defining the change in railroading that took place all over the world when, after WW 2, the diesel was proven to be so much more efficient than the steam engine. Thousands of working steam engines were scrapped by all US railroads and for the UP, Cheyenne was were they were torn down. Then passenger service was replaced by cars, buses and airplanes and it looked for several decades like the train itself would become extinct. But the manufacturers and retailers of America knew better. Nothing hauls bulk freight cheaper or faster than a well run railroad.Tonight Mona and I are once again sleeping within a short distance of a gentle reminder of the importance of America's railroads. Durant's old Union Pacific rolls freight about 1/4 mile to our south, east and west, about every 15 minutes. The diesels are smooth running and compared to the noise their predecessors made almost silent. Only the rocking of the hundreds of cars per train on their welded rails make a sort of white noise as they pass.But the reminders of the old and new of the UP remain in Cheyenne in two very important places. One is the station itself, which still has the massive yards working outside its doors every day.And just a few blocks away, in a quiet park which surrounds Minnehaha lake, sits the last symbol of steam railroad power.This is BIG BOY number 4004. Only a few of these massive engines remain on display in the world. One that I know of is still running out of its museum yard near Scranton, PA. They are hard to keep running. They eat coal like I eat ice cream and they are so long they cannot be used on most track because they cannot make the turns built for shorter engines.
But just standing beside old 4004 makes one realize the awesome power of the train. And last evening, as we were pulling out of a pizza shop after a light (?) supper south of Longmont, Colorado, I found myself being reminded of just that. I raced a UP diesel pulling about 20 cars along the highway at a heady 10 miles an hour. There were no cars on the road so I kept with the engines cab. The engineer saw us and waved and then I got the same thrill a kid gets when he raises his hand and jerks his fist to get a trucker to blow his horn.
Only the engineer did it just because we were there.
He waved again and smiled as I tooted our CRV's honker at him. Oh how I wished at that moment we were in the coach and I could have answered with a blast on our dual electric air horns! I think he might have actually heard them!
-Ken
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