About
About this site
What this is
Big Boy 4014 Tour is a non-commercial, open-source fan project built for the
250th-Anniversary tour. It pulls schedule data from Union Pacific’s public tour page,
validates it, and presents it through a lightweight web app and an iOS app. Both clients read
the same schedule.json file, so what you see here matches what the iOS app shows.
Not affiliated
This project is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Union Pacific Railroad Company. “Big Boy”, “Union Pacific”, the Union Pacific shield, and related marks are trademarks of Union Pacific Railroad Company; their use here is purely descriptive (nominative fair use) for the purpose of identifying the locomotive and tour this app covers.
Schedule data is sourced from up.com/about-us/history/steam/schedule and is reproduced as factual information only — dates, times, and public locations. We do not reproduce Union Pacific’s prose, photographs, or marketing materials. If anything in this app appears to misrepresent that relationship, please email revise.oxbows0v@icloud.com.
How it works
- Web: a static Astro site, deployed to GitHub Pages.
- iOS: a native SwiftUI app (iOS 17+) that bundles the latest schedule at build time and refetches the live copy on launch. App Store name: “Big Boy 4014 Tour.”
- Schedule pipeline: a daily GitHub Actions cron job fetches the UP schedule page, parses it into
schedule.json, validates against a JSON Schema, and commits the result. If the parser ever breaks, the workflow opens an issue and we fall back to hand-edited data. - Tracker: this site shows where 4014 is scheduled to be today, not GPS — UP doesn’t publish a live feed.
Source & license
Source code is MIT-licensed. The repository is private; for access or to report an issue, email revise.oxbows0v@icloud.com. The MIT license covers code only and does not grant any rights in third-party trademarks.
Contact
Bugs, takedown requests, or schedule corrections: email revise.oxbows0v@icloud.com. That’s the most reliable path; everything else is best-effort.