The Museum of the American Railroad began in 1962 with an exhibition at Dallas’s Fair Park. A collection assembled to show the steam era grew to include equipment that tells several different versions of American railroad history. Moving it to Frisco meant laying out a new rail site as well as arranging for historic equipment to travel over active lines. The museum now presents the outdoor collection through scheduled guided walks, giving visitors a chance to get close enough to compare the machines at full scale.
Union Pacific Big Boy No. 4018 is the piece that makes the logistics of the move easiest to picture. The locomotive weighed about 1.2 million pounds when it came to Frisco in August 2013, following a roughly 25-mile route from Fair Park over connecting tracks. A crew inspected and prepared the locomotive before the trip, after it had spent decades on display. The transfer drew hundreds of spectators to watch an engine built for heavy freight come to a stop at its new home.
On the tour, look for the two sets of driving wheels under No. 4018. The 4-8-8-4 designation counts four leading wheels, eight drivers in each of two groups and four trailing wheels. Articulation between the driving assemblies let a locomotive of that length handle curves while delivering the power Union Pacific needed in Utah and Wyoming. The collection’s Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 No. 4903 makes a good comparison. Its body encloses electrical equipment, and its pantographs were designed to draw power from overhead wires. Both machines depended on infrastructure that reflected the needs of their respective routes.
Among the smaller steam engines is No. 1625, built in 1918 to a five-foot track gauge for Imperial Russia. It never went overseas. After being adapted to standard gauge, it worked for the Frisco and later for Eagle-Picher’s mining operation in Oklahoma. Its route to preservation tells a story that the Big Boy’s size can easily overshadow. A single locomotive could pass from an international order to domestic railroad service and then spend a second career at a mine.
Visitor information
Researched November 2026.
Sources
More railroad museums in Texas
- Cleburne Railroad Museum — Cleburne: Railroad and community history museum
- Cotton Belt Depot Museum — Tyler: Depot and railroad artifact museum
- Galveston Railroad Museum — Galveston: Depot museum and railroad collection
- Martin & Frances Lehnis Railroad Museum — Brownwood: Railroad history museum
- Railway Museum of San Angelo — San Angelo: Depot and railroad history museum
- Rosenberg Railroad Museum — Rosenberg: Railroad museum and historic equipment collection
- Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — Temple: Depot museum and railroad equipment collection
- Texas & Pacific Railway Museum at Marshall Depot — Marshall: Depot and railroad history museum
- All 11 railroad museums and sites in Texas
Keep exploring
- All heritage sites — museums, stations and landmarks
- Southwest — the trains you can ride in the region