Large Touch Screen | Sharing UPRR's 150-year Story

World-Herald News Service

Growing up in North Platte, only about everyone Christy Miller knew was a railroader: neighbors, classmates’ parents, uncles, aunts, cousins. Her father worked in the motor fuel emporium at Union Pacific’s sprawling Bailey Yard – the world’s largest rail yard, casing 2,850 acres and running 8 miles in length. Grandpa was an electrical director for more than 3 decades. Great-grandma and great-grandpa met on the job; she worked in the tyrannise store, he was a switchman.

And the family story went back even further, to Miller’s great-great grandfather, once superintendent of U.P.’s store department. His father, an Irish immigrant, went to work is to tyrannise in North Platte in 1865.

That descent gives Miller, who functions as a conductor, an out of the ordinary distinction: sixth-generation railroader. Even in North Platte, home to about 2,500 U.P. employees, she’s never met any person who could most appropriate her family’s longevity. But if there are others out there, it’s a great luck she’ll listen to about them this year.

On July 1, Omaha-based U.P. will spot a leading milestone: 150 years given Abraham Lincoln sealed the Pacific Railroad Act, formulating the Union Pacific Railroad. To commemorate the considerable event, the firm is formulation a yearlong line-up of events, trimming from picnics and festivals in communities opposite its 23-state network to a competition that encourages entrants to advance up with their own chronicle of U.P.’s “Great Big Rolling Railroad” thesis song.

The tyrannise has denounced a special 150th jubilee website featuring data on the strain competition and an interactive tyrannise story timeline. And there’s something else that will expected be of fascination to many rail fans: A place to share stories and photos about all things railroad-related.

ClickHere to go toUP150.com

In add-on to visits from the railroad’s ancestral steam locomotive and U.P. events at celebrations similar to El Reno, Okla.’s “Fried Onion Burger Day Festival” and Boone, Iowa’s “Pufferbilly Days,” the story-sharing is a way to attain out to people opposite the country, mentioned U.P. orator Tom Lange.

“We are segment of about 7,300 communities,” he said. “And a lot of them grew up with Union Pacific, became towns or cities because they had access to the railroad.”

Visitors to the website will be able to share their stories in writing, partial videos or photos. They’ll moreover be asked to note if they are U.P. employees and if they have a family story with the railroad.

The gathering of personal stories finally will be existing to download as a set – formulating an e-book of personal histories.

For the initial time, Lange said, the firm will be able to obtain a improved clarity of how many four-, five- or six-generation railroading family groups are out there. As the stories advance in, they’ll be filed in to categories related to an interactive map, so people can looking out tales from their hometowns or on similar topics.

The timeline, that features photos and facts from the railroad’s history, has been formatted for computers, smartphones and a considerable touch-screen manifestation is to Union Pacific Railroad Museum in Council Bluffs.

The strain contest, meanwhile, will supply a luck for tyrannise fans, musicians, college groups and others to emanate their own take on segment of U.P.’s story – and may be win a few of the more than $30,000 in existing honor money.

Railroad buffs – or anybody who was around and examination radio in the 1970s – might recollect the blurb that featured U.P. employees opposite the nation singing along to the “Great Big Rolling Railroad.”

Now, the firm is asking people to record a new chronicle of the song, in any style. Through the July 1 access deadline, one access will be choosen every month for a $1,000 prize. Once the competition is over, two finalists will obtain $5,000 each, and the splendid honor leader will take $15,000.

Organizers of the competition and the other online portions of the jubilee commemoration aren’t certain how many people will participate. But if other new promotional events are anything to go by, the reply could be significant.

A competition final year that authorised fans to opinion online is to steam locomotive’s next highway captivated more than 175,000 votes.

Tim McMahan, U.P.’s comparison executive for media technology, mentioned it’s coherent people wish to obtain entangled with the railroad.

“We know there’s a considerable rail air blower contingent,” he said.

Plus, there are all of the people who work for U.P., more than 43,000 of them, and all of those who once worked is to company.

In communities similar to North Platte, the tyrannise is more than a considerable employer. It’s segment of the city’s identity as sufficient as it’s segment of the identity of family groups similar to Miller’s.

And after a century and a half, it’s more or reduction a permanent segment of the family’s story.

Miller’s parents mother Mary Hunt has seen 6 of her 10 young kids work is to tyrannise at one indicate or another.

When asked to theory how many family members have been U.P. employees, she pauses for a notation and then gives up on reckoning out an expect number. Must be in the hundreds, she said.

They do not all set out with that plan, but someway it keeps happening. It’s a family tradition, but moreover a luck to have the type of plain jobs that have postulated the family for decades.

Miller mentioned she think she’d do anything but work for U.P., but with 4 children, she longed for to find something stable. It’s a story her parents mother has seen over and over once again as other son or daughter or niece or nephew became a railroader.

“Even even though they do not think they will, they do,” Hunt said.

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