12 September 2013 North Platte, Nebraska

Today we visited the Golden Spike Tower, Union Pacific's Bailey Yard at North Platte, the largest railroad yard in the world. The 8-mile long railroad yard has 315 miles of track, and the tower gives spectacular views from the 7th floor open observation deck and the 8th floor enclosed observation deck.

Golden Spike Tower

Union Pacific Bailey Yard

The location for the yard was selected because it was mid way between St. Louis and Cheyene and the first train passed through it in 1866. The yard, named after a former Union Pacific president employs 2,600 people. It has 985 switches and handles 155 trains and 10,000 railroad cars every day. The cars are sorted through two hump yards (elevated mounds that allow individual rail cars to be sorted for their outbound destinations). The switches are controlled electronically, with computers keeping track of what trains are being built.

The trains are then moved out to a preparation track, and the carman hooks up the hoses and the brakes, readying everything for the engine to be put on the front, and the train moves out. No loading or unloading of the cars is done in this yard. Containers are loaded on special flatcars, and may have come off a ship in San Francisco or Seattle (or Tacoma) and be headed for Chicago.

East bound hump yard

Note cars traveling down the hump (in the distance to the left and 

below the storage tanks) to their designated train

The intricacies of keeping track of all the cars is mind boggling! The computers keep track of each car, who owns it, what's in it (especially important when transporting hazardous materials), where it's come from and where it's going. 

Diesel engine overhauls are preformed at the locomotive repair shop located within the yard. Over 10,000 sets of car wheels are also replaced at this shop. Union Pacific's massive locomotives use 14 million gallons of diesel every month. The five-minute video introduction at the tower said that crews were sent to Nascar pits to learn how to efficiently and quickly get repairs done, so that the locomotives would be out of service for as short a times as possible.

Locomotive Repair shop

We learned that the locomotives actually run on electricity from on-board generators powered by the diesel engines. The engineers adjust the amount of electricity going to the wheel motors in order to control the speed of the engine. Each locomotive is equipped with sand tanks that are filled at the yard's sand tower; sand is automatically applied to the tracks whenever the wheels spin or an emergency stop is triggered.

Sand tower--the train with the lights on is being

filled with sand at the left tower

The Golden Spike Tower also had a display describing the 1850-1930 movement by trains of 200,000 homeless and orphaned children from the streets and slums of east coast cities to the farmlands of the mid-west. They were called "Orphan Trains" and "Baby Trains." 

Another display described the activities of the North Platte Canteen. Started on December 25, 1941, more than 6 million servicemen being carried east on troop trains were met at the North Platte Union Pacific Depot and given food and drinks by volunteers from North Platte and from 125 communities. The canteen took great pride in knowing that not one penny of local, state, and federal money was used. This 10-minute stop on the way to war zones made a difference to many young soldiers away from their families--it was caring and cookies, concern and sandwiches. When the war ended, the trains were bringing soldiers the other direction--the North Platte Canteen still helped. It finally closed up shop on April 1, 1946, a job well done.

Grocery shopping, truck refueling, dinner at Applebees, and ice cream at 8:00 (Gramma Marge is known for her 8:00 ice cream) ended our stay in North Platte. On to Cheyene tomorrow.