Wok N Roll with us...Bob and Teri Along with Atlas and Kalani: North Platte, Nebraska September 21, 2018

Union Pacific’s Baily yard is the largest railroad classification yard in the world. This massive yard sorts over 14,000 railcars a day and is over 8 miles long and 2 miles wide. Most of the 2600 people that Union Pacific employs in North Platte, NE work at Baily Yard.

The train operations and repair shops at Baily Yard operate 24 hours a day, every day of the year. So often people think it’s the diesel engine that is powering the locomotive. The locomotive actually runs on electricity. The diesel engine turns a huge electric generator that creates electricity and the engineer adjusts the amount of voltage that is going to the electric motors that are connected to the wheels. The fueling and service center at Baily Yard processes over 9,000 locomotives every month.

Baily yard also has the only of its kind in the world, in-motion ultrasound wheel defect detector. This specialized equipment was developed by Union Pacific. The wheel repair facility replaces 10,000 pairs of wheels annually.

What we find most fascinating, however, is how the cars are sorted at Baily Yard. There are two hump yards or elevated mounds utilized to sort railcars. Each car is released from the train down the hump. As the cars proceed downward, retarders slow the car to the perfect speed to hook up to the train on one of 114 bowl tracks. These bowl tracks are used to assemble cars into individual trains that will take these cars to their final destination. Not only will the cars be on the correct trains, but they will be assembled in the correct order to allow partial drops of cars in individual cities along the way.

A bird’s eye view of all this action can be watched from the Golden Spike Tower. This is our second time to visit the Golden Spike Tower at Baily Yard (our first visit was in 2013). Our Post from 2013 of North Platte Like our first visit, the bird’s-eye view of this whole operation is still a fascinating thing to watch. If you look closely at the sequence of pictures you can see the cars as they progress from the hump to the bowl tracks.

The Golden Spike tower was also the site of the North Platte Canteen. In WWII, the railroads operated 200 special military troop trains a day. The North Platte Canteen was a railroad stop manned by local citizens. It operated for 5 years and provided free refreshments for the 3,000-5,000 soldiers a day who were traveling through the area on the train. There were no government funds and they operated on just the goodness of random strangers to keep up the canteen. They are said to have served 6 million soldiers.

We returned in the evening to see the yard at night. It is lit up and feels like its own city. Last, we were saddened to see that Jim Lawrence, one of the true pioneers for Union Pacific, that we had met in 2013, had sadly passed due to cancer. We feel honored to have met him and to have heard his wonderful stories of riding in the caboose, when the caboose was still park of the train that went through towns.

Tomorrow we head off to Badlands National Park in South Dakota.