Remarks: Mechanically this is a tired, worn-out engine, but one that is very valuable for stationary exhibit purposes.
The railroad's early troubles led to bankruptcy during the 1870s, the result of which was reorganization of the Union Pacific Railroad as the Union Pacific Railway on January 24, 1880. It was this second company that purchased Locomotive No. 737, but that company, too, entered bankruptcy in the 1890s from which it emerged on July 1, 1897, reverting again to the original name, Union Pacific Railroad. Such minor changes in corporate titles were a common result of reorganization after bankruptcy among American railroads, but the terms "railroad" and "railway," while interchangeable in common usage, are not interchangeable in the proper title of a company, and generally designate a specific and definable period in that company's history. It was during a surge of expansion in the late 1880s preceding the bankruptcy of the 1890s that the Union Pacific acquired diamond-stacked locomotive No. 737.
The original appearance of Union Pacific Railway Engine No. 737, as shown in an enlargement of a section of a photo of an official inspection train out on the line around 1890, differed considerably from that resulting from the misguided "restoration" by the Steamtown Foundation about 1969. Collection of the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, California State Railroad Museum Library
During the 19th century, the 4-4-0 was the most common type of American locomotive, so common that the type came to be called the "American Standard," or, to be briefer, simply the "American." Thousands of these locomotives rolled out of the erecting shops of America's locomotive builders. At mid-century, and at the time of the Civil War during the 1860s when the Union Pacific was just getting organized, the American-type locomotive was not only the passenger engine on America's railroads but also the freight engine, although by the 1860s and 1870s, 2-6-0 and 2-8-0 types were beginning to supplant it in main line freight service. Nevertheless, the American type continued to hold its dominance in passenger traffic until nearly the end of the century, when heavier and larger 4-6-0 "ten-wheelers" and eventually other types replaced the American on main line passenger trains. Increasingly, as time passed, 4-4-0 locomotives found themselves downgraded to branch line and short line service, where they continued to serve in ever-diminishing numbers until the middle of the 20th century, and some even came into the ownership of industrial concerns such as logging firms and sugar cane plantations. The 4-4-0 thus is a prime example of an engine that started out as a mainstay of main line passenger traffic (and, briefly, freight) on the nation's major railroad systems, but that by the 20th century had been replaced by heavier power and had been shunted aside to the branch line mixed trains as well as to use on lumber, mining, and other industrial railroads. Thus one era's main line motive power became a later era's secondary or branch line motive power. Of the thousands and thousands of these locomotives built in America, only about 39 examples of the 4-4-0 American survive in the United States.
Fittingly, Union Pacific Railway Engine No. 737, the oldest locomotive in the Steamtown collection used in the United States, began its career in 1887 as part of one of the largest locomotive orders on record up to that date, for use on Union Pacific passenger and freight trains. As delivered, the locomotive had a long, pointed, vertical bar wooden pilot, an oil "box" headlight, a "diamond" stack of the shallow diamond style peculiar to the Union Pacific at that period, and steam and sand domes that appeared comparatively square in profile and lacked the common, ornate, cast-iron dome "rings," a decorative molding that dressed up the appearance of such domes and that many 19th century locomotives sported. Upon entering service, the locomotive reportedly had the initials "O.& R.V." painted on the small panel below the windows on each side of the cab, standing for the name of a Union Pacific subsidiary in Nebraska, the Omaha & Republican Valley Railroad. Later the locomotive had "Union Pacific" spelled out in small letters on each side of the cab, probably in white, and a large white "737" on each side of its black tender.
In August 1904 (different sources disagree on the date), the Union Pacific, since July 1897 again a "Railroad," sold Locomotive No. 737 and a few similar 4-4-0s to either Morgan's Louisiana and Texas Railroad and Steamship Company or the Texas and New Orleans Railroad, both of them components of the Southern Pacific System. A Union Pacific Railroad folio locomotive diagram book issued in 1911 showed engines of this class as having had their diamond stacks replaced with straight or "shotgun" stacks, but whether that change had been made before the sale of Locomotive No. 737 is not known.
By the time it purchased Locomotive No. 737, the Southern Pacific Company had grown into a major railroad system that incorporated many smaller companies, such as the Texas and New Orleans and Morgan's Louisiana and Texas, and that extended from New Orleans through Texas to El Paso, across New Mexico and through Tucson, Arizona, to Los Angeles, throughout most of California including San Francisco and Sacramento; it absorbed the Central Pacific extending eastward across Nevada to Ogden, and had lines reaching north throughout and across Oregon to Portland. Developed by the same Big Four California entrepreneurs who had built the Central Pacific--Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker--the Southern Pacific became their tool for expansion beyond the original Central Pacific, which one might have expected to grow instead, but the Southern Pacific corporate structure proved more amenable to their needs than that of the Central Pacific. Thus the historic Central Pacific slowly vanished into the corporate structure of the Southern Pacific as the original developers of the system passed one by one from the economic scene.