Nobody has seen one in close to a century, and they’d know it if they had: With eight-foot-tall drive wheels, a boiler a full-grown man could walk under, and the capacity to pull 50 tons, the Case 150 HP steam engine laid claim to the largest road locomotive of its time. That will change later this year when one of the Case’s admirers plans to unveil his entirely hand-built 25-foot-long, 10-foot-wide full-size replica.

Despite the proliferation of railroads across the United States during the Twentieth Century, rails still didn’t reach everywhere. Remote locations, quarries, and other places that were hard to reach or not economically feasible for a railroad typically went unserved, but still had a need for heavy haulage. Just after the turn of the century, officials at J.I. Case in Racine, Wisconsin, believed they could fill that niche with a massive steam-powered traction engine that could pull double duty plowing fields.

A revival of the road locomotive brings a twist to the term "classic auto."