On the road to Iowa

Glenwood Springs, Colorado

View from the Walmart parking lot where we over nighted after jeeping all day in Marble.

Did someone say recess?

Cameron Pass

The Star of the show

Bailey Yard is the world’s largest railroad classification yard. It sorts, services and repairs locomotives and cars headed all across North America. Owned and operated by the Union Pacific Railroad, Bailey Yard is located in North Platte, Nebraska.

Cindy and Spike

The gigantic Bailey Yard is midway between Chicago and Salt Lake City and halfway between Denver and Omaha. It covers a total expanse of 2,850 acres and is over 8 miles in length and 2 miles wide. The yard has 200 separate tracks totaling 315 miles of track, 985 switches, 766 turnouts, and 17 receiving and 16 departure tracks. Union Pacific employs more than 2,600 people in North Platte, most of whom are responsible for the day-to-day operations of Bailey Yard.

An average of 139 trains and over 14,000 railroad cars pass through Bailey Yard every day, and the yard sorts approximately 3,000 cars daily using the yard’s two humps. The eastbound hump is a 34 feet tall mound and the westbound hump is 20 feet high. These are used to sort four cars a minute into one of the 114 "bowl" tracks, 49 tracks for the westbound trains and 65 for eastbound. The bowl tracks are used to form trains headed for destinations across North America, including the East, West and Gulf coasts of the United States, and Canadian and Mexican borders.

The yard also includes a locomotive fueling and servicing center that handles more than 8,500 locomotives per month, a locomotive repair shop that can repair 750 locomotives monthly, and a car repair facility that handles nearly 50 cars daily. The car repair shop replaces 10,000 pairs of wheels each year. The yard features an in-motion wheel defect detector developed by Union Pacific that uses ultrasound technology to inspect each wheel. It is the only such detector in the world. UP has also developed a method for changing wheels in the field on empty westbound coal trains, which enables three workers to use a hydraulic jack under the couplers between two cars and exchange the trucks.^[ This has reduced the time needed to replace trucks from up to 12 days to 8–12 minutes.

Locomotives can be serviced in a NASCAR -like pit stop facility staffed by five crew members—an electrician, machinist, fireman, oiler, and car inspector.  Locomotives are serviced in 45 minutes without detaching them from their trains.

Because of the enormous amount of products that pass through Bailey Yard, Union Pacific describes the yard as an “economic barometer of America.”

  

Getting close to our destination we went through the small town of Pilger Nebraska. We instantly looked at each other and said WOW, what happened here?  Turns out on June 16th the town was terrorized by twin tornadoes with both being rated at a minimum EF4.

Picture as seen in the local newspaper

 The twister was on the ground for more than an hour.

 Blue Ox Tow Bar Company

We stop by here to have a little maintenance done to our tow bar.  Would have been $250.00 at home.  They charged us $30.00. They have a campground onsite for their customers to stay for free if having work done.  The campground facility is nicer than most campgrounds we have stayed in.  Even if you don't have a Blue Ox you can stay here for $15.00 a night. Great deal.



Dave washing the bug off the front

Talk about a wide load