Bailey Train Yard, North Platte, Nebraska

I promised I would revisit some of the highlights that I neglected to share over the last leg of our cross country journey. One of the most amazing things we saw along the way was in North Platte, Nebraska, The Golden Spike Tower and Visitor Center of Union Pacific Railway's famous "Bailey Yard".

 

 

This massive train yard is the world's largest railroad "classification" yard.  It is 8 miles long and 2 miles wide and has 200 different tracks totaling 315 miles of track. This includes 17 receiving and 16 departure tracks, as well as 985 switches and 766 turnouts.

 

Union Pacific's Bailey Train Yard processes an average of 139 trains and over 14,000 railroad cars per day. Freight trains filled with coal, lumber grain, commercial goods and a host of other products moving from hubs in Chicago or Kansas City, from the west coast and the east, meeting in this monster of a train yard to be broken up and reclassified (assembled into new trains) and inspected, with problem locomotives or cars swapped out and repaired.




This is the service yard where ailing cars and locomotives wait in line
 at the service bays to be serviced before re-joining the force.

The Golden Spike Tower allows the visitor to view the entire operation from any direction as trains come in (about one every 15 minutes), get broken up, reassembled to form new trains and are sent on their way in as little as 90 minutes.

 

 

On of the coolest things to see were the two hump yards. These were basically hills (or mounds) where trains were pushed up on a single track and then, through an automated process, de-coupled and sent rolling down the hill, channeling each car to one of the 114 bowl tracks, used to form new trains headed for destinations across North America and the to the Canadian and Mexican borders.



This is one of the hump yards. The single train car has been decoupled from the rest of the train
and is rolling down the "hump" toward it's destination track to become part of a new train.

Incoming trains are alerted to the change to "Central Time"
 

We stayed at the train yard visitor center for about two hours and had the opportunity to talk to a recently-retired "train man" who was now a volunteer in the visitor center. He loved to talk about the train yard and told us about the operations center in Omaha where most of the planning, coordination and automation of the train yard occurred and he generously allowed us to pick his brain for about an hour about every aspect of the train yard. It was an amazing day and well worth the $8 admission price.