This oil-burning steam locomotive is the 819. It was built way back in 1942 in this very building, which was the Cotton Belt Route machine shop for the St. Louis Southwestern Railway Company. This very building, by the way, is at 1720 Port Road in Pine Bluff, and it now houses the Arkansas Railroad Museum. The locomotive was donated to the city of Pine Bluff in 1955. The Cotton Belt Historical Society (Inc.) acquired it in 1983, and restoration to operating condition was completed in 1986.

How big? How much? How fast? How loud? Huge! Lots! Really! Mightily!

More specifically, the 819 is 100 feet long, weighs 368 tons, is capable of cruising at highway speeds; and if you feed it twelve gallons of oil, it will take you and a thousand tons of your carry-on baggage one mile. It's as massive as an apartment building, and it MOVES, okay? Just hearing the figures doesn't convey the size of the thing. Each of those driving wheels is as tall as a man and weighs as much as a Ford Mustang. Look! There's a man standing next to one of those driving wheels right now!

Want to know the very definition of a good time? A couple of times a year, the boys take her out for a spin, just to blow the cobwebs off. Sometimes she makes trips as part of one or another regional celebrations, taking with her a few of the vintage private and touring cars from the museum. Of course, there are no more water towers along the tracks to fill the boilers, so arrangements must be made with local fire departments along the route for fire trucks to meet them and give the big monster a drink. For information concerning their next function, here's the Pine Bluff Visitor's Bureau toll-free number: 1-800-536-7660.

P.S. If you've been wondering what to do with your old crankcase oil, save it for these guys. They'll use it for fuel. Also, there's lots more to the museum than just this. There's railroad equipment, memorabilia, other locomotives, snowplows, passenger cars (some of which are on occasion leased to operations like the White River Railroad), touring cars and private cars in addition to the building itself. Most of their stuff is postwar. Note that the old-timers who run the place are retired railroad men, not historians. Their knowledge is first hand.