One of must-see sights for us has been the world's largest rail yard. Located in North Platte, Nebraska, the Bailey Rail Yard (Union Pacific) handles over 10,000 railcars per day. Golden Spike Tower allows you to see part of the action. The yard is eight miles long and over one and a half miles wide in some stretches. It contains two hump yards, two sets of bowl tracks, and a locomotive repair shop.
There is a hump yard and a set of bowl tracks for both eastbound and westbound tracks. Railcars are pushed onto the elevated track (hump). From there, each railcar is sorted and sent to one of the bowl tracks. The cars in the bowl tracks are then coupled with trains heading to the appropriate destination.
There are 64 bowl tracks headed east and 50 bowl tracks headed west. They're called bowl tracks because the ground is actually shaped like a bowl. The tracks end in an incline to prevent trains from getting out before they're ready.
We left the railyard to stop by the Cody Park Railroad Museum. They have the only Challenger 3900 steam engine on public display as well as a 6900 series diesel locomotive. Not as big as the Big Boy in Cheyenne, Challenger is still pretty impressive. We liked that you could climb in it and touch a few things. Thankfully, they knew the train horn would be too hard to resist and had it disconnected.
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| Pump Action |
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| Diesel shop, Eastbound Hump Yard and Bowl |
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| Check out the railyard factoids |
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| Locomotives at the ready |
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| Challenger 3900 |
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| Hands On |
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| Challenger 3977 |
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| Engineer looks suspect to me |
Where Are We Going Next?
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