Grand Canyon Railway No. 4960

Design and Construction

No. 4960 is an O-1a class 2-8-2 “Mikado” built by the Baldwin Locomotive Works in August 1923 for the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, one of a large fleet of Mikados the CB&Q relied on for fast freight across its largely level Midwestern territory. Unlike locomotives built for mountain railroads, the O-1a class was designed around speed and route mileage rather than raw grade-climbing power, reflecting the flat, high-mileage freight corridors the Burlington operated across Illinois and neighboring states.

Revenue Service (1923–1958)

No. 4960 spent its working life hauling freight in Illinois before moving to the CB&Q’s Beardstown Division for coal service, and it made its final revenue run in the late 1950s as the railroad’s dieselization program worked through the last of its steam roster.

Museum and School-Train Years (1958–1989)

Rather than being scrapped outright, No. 4960 was chosen for the CB&Q’s “Steam Choo-Choo” school-train program, giving thousands of Midwestern schoolchildren a firsthand look at working steam power well into the 1960s, after most of the fleet it had run alongside had already been cut up. When the railroad ended its excursion and school-train program in 1966, the locomotive began a long stretch of passing between museum and private owners rather than actively working: a stint with the Circus World Museum in Wisconsin, another with the Mid-Continent Railway Museum, and a period leased to the Bristol and North Western Railroad in Virginia, none of which put the engine back under steam for regular service.

Restoration and Return to the Rails (1989–1996)

The newly reborn Grand Canyon Railway purchased No. 4960 in 1989 and undertook one of the most extensive locomotive rebuilds of the era, a roughly 30-month project beginning in the railway’s own Williams, Arizona shops that replaced flues, tubes, bearings, coal-handling systems, the front and rear flue sheets, and the superheater system, alongside a new six-axle tender to replace the CB&Q’s smaller original. The roughly $1.6 million project also converted the locomotive from coal to oil firing. No. 4960 made its maiden run for Grand Canyon Railway on July 9, 1996, hauling passengers the 65 miles from Williams to the South Rim.

Recent Conversion and Current Operations

In 2009, No. 4960 was converted again, this time to burn recycled waste vegetable oil, making it one of the few operating steam locomotives in the country running on biofuel rather than petroleum-based oil or coal. The fuel itself comes from an unusually local source: thousands of pounds of used fryer oil collected from restaurants in Williams, Phoenix, and at the South Rim, including Xanterra’s own Grand Canyon dining facilities, then filtered and refined by a Phoenix-area processing partner before it ever reaches the locomotive’s tender. Each round trip to the canyon burns roughly 1,200 gallons of the recycled oil, and railfans and park visitors alike have taken to calling No. 4960 the “French Fry Express” for the distinctive smell that trails the train. The conversion earned Grand Canyon Railway a National Park Service Director’s Environmental Achievement Award, recognition for turning a waste product generated by the park’s own restaurants into fuel for one of its signature attractions.

Recognition

No. 4960 is the only surviving ex-Chicago, Burlington and Quincy steam locomotive still in operation anywhere, a distinction that rests as much on the CB&Q’s own decision to keep it running as a school-train ambassador in the 1960s as on Grand Canyon Railway’s later restoration. Its continued daily runs to the South Rim give visitors a working example of a type of American freight power, the fast Midwestern Mikado, that has otherwise disappeared entirely from active rails, now doing the job on recycled cooking oil rather than the Illinois coal it burned for the Burlington.