HEBER CITY -- The star has been backstage in makeup.
Getting the face painted just right. Running lines. Gussying up for the role.Now it's curtain time.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you would, please, a big hand for . . . "The Movie Train."
Engine No. 75 and its supporting cast in the cars behind -- featured in 31 movies, including "Breakheart Pass," "The Professionals" and "A River Runs Through It" -- makes its bow here Memorial Day, with an unveiling at 10 a.m. Monday kicking off the summer season for the Heber Valley Historic Railroad.
"We've taken it all apart, gotten the aches out of its joints and brought it back to life. Now it's ready to put on a show," said Craig Drury, the railroad's chief mechanical officer, who has been with the Heber Creeper since 1971 and supervised the overhaul of 75.
Engine 75 will be paired with the Heber Creeper's other steam engine, No. 618, as part of a special Memorial Day "double-header," with both pufferbellies chuffing through a Provo Canyon run from Vivian Park to the main terminal, 450 S. 600 West in Heber.
You might say it's a calling of the hogs.
"That's what they used to call steam engines -- 'hogs,' because the engines kind of gave that snuffling snorting sound. And engineers were 'hogs-heads,' " said Drury.
Now the two hogs will be rooting each other up the grades toward Deer Creek Dam.
"Either one could pull the train quite easily, but it's pretty spectacular when you see steam engines coupled together chugging up a grade," Drury said.
It has been a rather long haul getting the movie train back in a starring role.
Originally a sugarbeet hauler for the Great Western Railway, it had languished in
Loveland, Colo., where the late Everett Rohrer kept it for movie work until his death in 1998. Windswept, grit-pitted, its paint stripped, its steel jacketing rotted in some spots, it was a bit of a ghost of the train showing so handsomely in movies, some of them shot in Utah.
Creeper officials found it available for a relative pittance -- $175,000 -- and brought it here last June.
"We've been working on it steadily ever since," said Ken McConnell, director of marketing, engineer and conductor. "Craig Drury and his crew have done a marvelous job of restoring the 75."
That has included reworking the smoke box, said John Rimmasch, road foreman.
"In simple terms, we helped it breathe better. You need the right mixture of air, fuel and heat to get the right amount of steam," Rimmasch said.
Volunteers have labored affectionately over 75, giving it the face-lift. Orville Watson, a sheet-metal expert in his day job in Salt Lake City, masterminded the re-banding of the metal jacket housing the engine's guts. His Daniel neighbor, Doug Wimer, reassembled the tongue-and-groove floorboard.
Adam Eastman oversaw repainting -- two new coats of epoxy black for the exterior, traditional green for the inside of the cab.
"Oh no, you could never paint the cab interior anything but green. It's railroad tradition, and we do everything we can to adhere strictly to tradition," McConnell said.
Steve "Doc" Lewis and his son, Mike, came from their Orem homes night after night and concentrated on the brasswork.
One special piece: the boiler plate.
"Baldwin Locomotive Works. Sept. 1907, Philadelphia USA, 31778," it says.
Curiously, No. 618 was built the same year, but is dramatically different from 75.
"Like going to a hamburger joint, people wanted their trains the way they wanted them. Seventy-five was built more along the lines of 1870s-style engines," Rimmasch said.
It'll be a reunion of sorts for Drury, who first laid eyes on 75 as a South High School student in 1967, when it was sitting off I-15 and Redwood Road on the old Saltair Line, fresh from filming a movie with William Holden and Vince Edwards.
"I saw that smoke curling off the highway and that was it. I had to see it," Drury said.
It began a lifelong love affair with steamers. He even took a picture of 75 with him on his LDS mission to New Zealand.
Monday also will mark a reunion for Melanie Pickar, Rohrer's daughter, who'll be on hand with her husband, John, for the unveiling.
"She said this is the only way things could have happened for the 'Movie Train,' for it to keep giving people enjoyment in a setting like ours," said Craig Lacey, executive director of the railroad.
E-mail: gtwyman@desnews.com