On April 28, 2014 I began the four-week Overland trip, the same day the massive steam locomotive Big Boy 4014 left California for Cheyenne. We would cross paths during the trip.
"Overland" is a 230 page pictorial spanning the Union Pacific along the famed Overland Route - and the Lincoln Highway which follows the steel ribbon for most of the part - from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean - Council Bluffs to Oakland.

The idea for this trip was lingering in my mind for years. Little did I know about US railroading, except for a handful of famous locations, when I visited Sherman Hill for a few hours in April 1995. I travelled along the Overland Route west of Salt Lake City in September 2002 for a magazine story about the Central Pacific. And once more for a single day in February 2009 when I took the Interstate 80 from Cheyenne to Salt Lake City. I was ready for more but the distance to the subject took its toll.

From 2012 on my bookshelf filled with books about the Overland Route when the concept of a documentary trip from the Missouri River to the Pacific took shape. The stories about pioneer characters like Theodore Judah and General Dodge were so fascinating that I wanted to travel along their entire accomplishment, the first trancontinental railroad. Necessarily in a single cross-country trip. It seems like a strange coincidence that I was born in May 1969, exactly 100 years after the Golden Spike was driven at Promontory, Utah.