The Return of Standard Oil No. 1: How a 1920 Locomotive Links Casper to Its Forgotten Golden Age

For a moment, a piece of Casper’s past came face-to-face with the city’s present. As a transport truck carried a century-old steam locomotive back to Wyoming, the journey included a stop near the refinery grounds where the engine had spent much of its working life. The surrounding landscape had changed, the industrial city had grown, and generations had passed. Yet the locomotive at the center of the journey remained a physical link to the people and industries that helped build Casper.

Known as Standard Oil No. 1, the compact locomotive has returned to Casper after more than 60 years at the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden, Colorado. Built in 1920, it spent 42 years moving tank cars around the Standard Oil refinery before being retired in 1962. Now, its new home at Fort Caspar Museum offers residents and visitors a chance to connect with a chapter of local history that can be difficult to fully appreciate through photographs and written records alone.

During the early twentieth century, Casper earned its reputation as the “Oil Capital of the Rockies.” The petroleum industry helped transform the community, drawing workers, supporting businesses, and creating demand for the transportation networks needed to move oil and refined products. The refinery was more than an industrial facility. It was part of the economic foundation on which generations of local families built their lives.

Railroads played a critical role in that story. Before modern transportation and logistics systems reshaped the industry, locomotives moved railcars through refinery yards, connecting industrial operations with the wider rail network. Standard Oil No. 1 performed a specialized but essential job, switching tank cars around the refinery. Its work was not the dramatic long-distance journey often associated with steam trains, but the daily movement of railcars helped keep a much larger operation running.

The engine itself is an Alco 0-4-0T tank locomotive built by the Cooke Works of the American Locomotive Company in Paterson, New Jersey. Its compact design, with four driving wheels and water tanks incorporated into the locomotive, suited the tight movements required in an industrial yard. Though small compared with many mainline steam engines, it served for more than four decades in an environment central to Casper’s growth.

When Standard Oil No. 1 was retired in 1962, it left Wyoming and entered a new chapter at the Colorado Railroad Museum. There, it was given the nickname “Lulu Belle” and at one point was used as a billboard for the museum. Over the years, its Standard Oil identity was restored, and the locomotive became a familiar attraction for visitors, including children discovering railroad history for the first time.

Its time in Colorado helped preserve the engine, even as it remained far from the community where its working life began. The opportunity to bring it home developed through cooperation between the Colorado Railroad Museum, the City of Casper, and local history advocates. Fort Caspar Museum volunteer and local historian Con Trumbull played a significant role in advancing the effort, helping reconnect the locomotive with the place it represents.

The return carries particular significance for Casper’s railroad heritage. Although rail transportation helped shape the city’s development, Casper has lacked a prominent historic railroad artifact on public display. Standard Oil No. 1 offers a direct, visible connection to that past, linking the refinery, the rail lines, and the workers whose labor supported the city’s industrial growth. Its presence at Fort Caspar Museum gives that history a physical landmark rather than leaving it only in archival records and memories.

Bringing the locomotive back is only the beginning of the preservation work. Fort Caspar Museum and its supporters have launched a fundraising campaign with a $15,000 goal to help cover transportation, permanent placement, and cosmetic restoration. Planned work includes improvements to the locomotive’s appearance and cab, with the longer-term aim of allowing visitors to step inside and experience the engine more closely. These efforts will require community support, careful restoration, and time.

For younger visitors, the locomotive could become an especially meaningful way to encounter local history. A steam engine can make the past feel immediate: its wheels, metal fittings, controls, and working design offer details that a textbook cannot fully convey. With restoration and interpretive work, Standard Oil No. 1 can help future generations understand how oil, railroads, and industrial labor shaped the community they know today.

The locomotive’s return is therefore about more than moving an old machine across state lines. It is about bringing home a reminder of the people who worked in Casper’s refinery yards, the transportation systems that supported the oil industry, and the decades when industrial activity helped define the city. Standard Oil No. 1 spent 42 years doing its job in Casper, more than six decades away, and has now returned to a community ready to preserve its story.

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Image Credit: Colorado Railroad Museum