Central Pacific's "Jupiter"

The working replica at the Golden Spike National Historic Site, Utah, USA. As for Union Pacific's #119 there are only a couple of minor safety-related changes in the replica vs. the original. It's just as gaudy, for one thing! I tended to think of Victorian locomotives as gray and dull, from all those old grainy b&w's, but in fact they were quite colorful.

The funnel-shaped smokestack indicates this is a wood-burner. Wood-burning locomotives were quite common in 19th century North America, due to the abundance of trees in many places. Convenient forests were hard to come by in long-settled localities!

This is the site, in the Utah desert north of the Great Salt Lake, where the original US transcontinental railroad was completed. The Central Pacific built eastward from California, while the Union Pacific built westward from Omaha, Nebraska. The link (the "Golden Spike") was finished on May 10, 1869.

Ironically, this section of the railroad is now abandoned, being bypassed by a shortcut directly across the Great Salt Lake that was built just after the turn of the last century, and the rails were torn up in 1942 and recycled for the war effort! A short section was rebuilt in the 1960s for the historic park so the replicas would have a place to travel.