Service stop
Hays, KS
E 9th and Milner St.
What’s happening at this stop
A whistle-stop rather than a display. 4014 is scheduled to arrive in Hays in the early afternoon of July 24 near the 9th and Milner Street area and remain in town overnight before departing on the morning of July 26. It is a trackside pause, not a walk-up display — no tickets, no cab access, and no organized close-up viewing — and timing can move with railroad operations.
Hays grew up as a Kansas Pacific railhead in 1867 beside Fort Hays; the line is now Union Pacific track.
Why this stop matters
Hays began as a frontier railhead. The Kansas Pacific — building west across the plains toward Denver — reached the site in 1867 alongside the Army's Fort Hays, and the town that sprang up became an outfitting point and cattle-shipping station notorious for its lawlessness. William F. Cody hunted buffalo to feed the railroad's construction crews near here.
The Kansas Pacific was consolidated into the Union Pacific in 1880, making Hays a genuine UP town on the original Kansas City–Denver line — home rails for 4014 as it recrosses the high plains it was never built to work but that the Union Pacific has run for more than a century and a half.