Hays, KS

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.