I visited Golden Spike Tower and Visitor Center. I am not a train enthusiast but found this museum and working rail yard fascinating. Union Pacific’s Bailey Yard in North Platte, Nebraska is the largest railroad classification yard in the world. The yard covers 2,850 acres, reaching a total length of eight miles. My pictures don’t really do justice to the expansiveness.
Bailey Yard has 17 receiving and 16 departure tracks handling 14,000 rail cars every 24 hours. 3,000 cars are sorted daily in the yard’s eastward and westward yards, nicknamed “hump” yards.
Using a mound cresting 34 feet for eastbound trains and 20 feet for those heading west, the hump yards allow four cars a minute to roll gently into any of 114 “bowl” tracks. Here they become part of trains headed for destinations in the East, West and Gulf Coasts of America, as well as the Canadian and Mexican borders. An average of 139 trains per day travel through.
The yard also has a huge locomotive repair shop where they maintain and repair over 750 engines each month. I also spent time in the tower learning about orphan trains, where young children were picked up from the streets of larger cites like New York and sent to families all over the states. A really informative couple hours at another great historical site as I explore Nebraska.
