Big Boy 4014 rolled through Fostoria on June 6 and drew about 13,000 people to the Iron Triangle Rail Park, turning a whistle stop into a crowd scene that matched roughly the city’s population. Irv Oslin drove 94 miles for it and spent about three hours waiting for the locomotive to pass.
For Oslin, the draw was not just size. Big Boy No. 4014 is the world’s largest operating steam locomotive, and it is the only one still running out of 25 built between 1941 and 1944 by the American Locomotive Company of Schenectady, N.Y. Union Pacific sent it out this summer with Norfolk Southern, and the stop in Fostoria gave rail fans a rare chance to see a piece of rolling history in motion.
That chance was not as clean as Oslin expected. He parked his truck on Columbus Avenue and found about 500 people already in and around the park by 11 a.m., with the eastbound train not scheduled to arrive until 2:20 p.m. The long wait gave photographers time to set up, but it also gave the crowd time to swell, and Oslin said the scene lost some of the dramatic open space he had hoped for when people surged past the police tape.
He came for the picture and got the spectacle instead. Big Boy’s route and timing meant the best shots were gone before the locomotive arrived, with the heaviest crowd already packed near the track and no easy way to hold a clear foreground. Oslin summed up the pull of the day with a shrug: “What’s all the hoopla?” and, later, “What’s the big deal?”
That is why the Fostoria stop mattered. The train was not just another passing engine, but a 1.2 million-pound locomotive on a summer tour that turned one afternoon in Ohio into a rail-fan gathering of rare scale. Whether Oslin ultimately got the photo he wanted is still the open question, but the bigger answer was already plain on June 6: Big Boy 4014 brought the crowd, and the crowd changed the view.
