Towns and Nature: North Platte, NE: UP Bailey Yard and Grain Elevator

Grain Elevator: (Satellite)

Jim Pearson Photography posted

During my recent cross-country trip to Washington state, I stopped off at the Golden Spike Tower, in North Platte, Nebraska on Jun 17th, 2023, and caught this Union Pacific freight heading through the yard as it passed a minor derailment in the Bailey yard there from the top of the tower. The tower makes for a great shooting platform with the right lenses.

According to Wikipedia: Bailey Yard is the world's largest railroad classification yard. Employees sort, service and repair locomotives and cars headed across North America. Owned and operated by the Union Pacific Railroad (UP), Bailey Yard is in North Platte, Nebraska. The yard is named after former Union Pacific president Edd H. Bailey.

Tech Info: Nikon D800, RAW, Nikon 70-300mm @135mm, f/5.6, 1/1250, ISO 900.

John Weeks posted 12 images with the comment:

Visted the Union Pacific Bailey Yard and the Cody Park Railroad Museum, both in North Platte, Nebraska.

Bailey Yard is the largest railroad classification yard in the world. Located on the Union Pacific transcontinental line, it handles 150 trains per day and over 12,000 cars per day, with 3,000 of those cars needing to be sorted and switched into different trains. The facility is 8 miles long and contains over 300 miles of railroad track.

The yard has a very nice visitor center with an 8 story tall observation deck.

The Cody Park Railroad Museum displays some equipment that was donated by the Union Pacific Railroad.

1
Golden Spike visitor center and observation tower at Bailey Yard in North Platte, Nebraska.

2
Diesel servicing facility. The eastbound fuel and sand pumps are just to the right of the building, and the eastbound classification tracks are on the far right.

3
A long string of locomotives are parked in the foreground waiting for crews to go pick up trains to leave the yard for other destinations. The eastbound hump yard is behind the locomotives. In a hump yard, they push a train backwards over a small hill and let each car roll down the other side of the hill one at a time. Computers line up the switches to put each car on the proper track for the train it needs to join up with. They sort about 3,000 cars a day in this manner.

4
Yard control building in the foreground, holding tracks in the background where assembled trains wait for crews and locomotives to start the next leg of their journey.

5
Satellite view of the Bailey Yard from Google Maps, with the blue dot showing my location.

6
Railroad hand car. That must have been a cold miserable job out on the plains in the winter. Today, they use “hi-rail” trucks for track inspection and light maintenance (highway trucks with a set of railroad wheels bolted on).

7
Challenger locomotive from the 1940’s. This is the only one left on display. There is one other survivor located in the Quad Cities that is being restored back into operating condition. Note that there are 2 sets of steam cylinders on this side, one up front and one in the middle. This is essentially 2 locomotives on a single frame. The front part of the locomotive swivels to allow such a long engine to negotiate turns.

8
The control cab of the Challenger locomotive. The engineer is on the right and the fireman is on the left.

9
A Centennial class diesel locomotive built in the 1970 time frame. When diesels were new, they were far less powerful than the large steamers. It often took 4 to 6 diesels to do the same work as one Big Boy or Challenger steam locomotive. Union Pacific tried several schemes to make a larger locomotive. In this class of engines, they basically put 2 diesels on one chassis. At 6,600 horsepower, the DDA40X locomotives were the most powerful diesels ever built and operated.

10
The control cab of the Centennial locomotive.

11
A Pacific Fruit Express car from the 1970s. PFE ran express trains from California to deliver fresh fruit to the Midwest and east coast. Up until the 60s, it was a complex operation that involved harvesting ice in northern states in winter, then shipping the ice to ice stations along the train route during summer. The logistics were vastly simplified when mechanical refrigerator cars became practical, such as this car.

12
The first commercial application of barcodes was to track train cars. The system was not successful, but future development of the technology using lasers became common a decade later.

UP is building another large yard in Texas, Brazos. But Bailey, 2800 acres, will still be larger than Brazos, 1800 acres. (The Brazos Yard has been put on hold and the hump in Proviso Yard has been closed.)

Midwest Media by Melanie posted
Big Boy 4014 sits in North Platte until Sunday, July 2. Then the steam engine continues toward home (Cheyenne, Wyoming).

Damon Uebel posted [Another view on Flickr]
I switched here in 1978...UP Bailey Yard (Worlds Largest rail classification yard)
[Conway was the largest before this one was expanded.]
Kyle L. Raby It will take a drastic cut in jobs if UP sticks to precision railroading. [Hunter Harrison, the originator of precision railroading. thought flat switching cuts of cars was more efficient than a hump yard.]
Vincent Barrois Jr. I can remember looking at the boards out there when I first hired out and the switchmans extra board at that time had over 100 men.

Jordan Villont commented on Damon's posting

When we used to drive to Denver, the observation tower had not yet been built. One of the photos indicates that admission is charged. The base of the tower has a building with a lot of displays and a gift shop.

William Rieger, a photo of a photo

David Nicholas, cropped

Bailey Yard
Union Pacific’s Bailey Yard in North Platte, Neb., is the largest railroad classification yard in the world. Named in honor of former Union Pacific President Edd H. Bailey, the massive yard covers 2,850 acres, reaching a total length of eight miles. The yard is located in the midst of key east-west and north-south corridors, making it a critical component of Union Pacific’s rail network.
Bailey Yard has 17 receiving and 16 departure tracks handling 14,000 rail cars every 24 hours. Of those, about 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, comprised of raw and finished goods, such as automobiles, coal, grain, corn, sugar, chemicals, steel and consumer goods, including electronics, apparel and other retail products, are handled at Bailey Yard.
To keep America moving, train operations and repair shops at Bailey Yard are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The fueling and service center processes more than 9,000 locomotives each month, using technology like overhead cranes and elevated work bays to maintain fluid operations.

On-site Car Repair
The on-site car repair facility annually replaces 10,000 pairs of wheels, many identified through an in-motion defect detector using ultrasound technology to inspect the wheel. This detector was developed by Union Pacific and is the only one in the world. Some wheel repairs even take place without the rail car ever leaving the track, minimizing down time.
[UPfacilities]

What is unclear is how many of those 139 trains are run-through unit trains and how many are merchandise trains that have to be processed by a hump.

Gary Mcclenahan shared a UP event.
Rodney Thomas: The far right is the empty coal yard.

It looks like the elevator has its own locomotive.

Street View, Mar 2012

Paul Biwer

Carlo Emanuele Barbi, cropped
[And that is just the west side of the yard. This 64-track hump handles the eastbound traffic. The tower is in the middle of the yard on the south side and the westbound traffic hump yard is east of the tower.]

I found several photos looking West, but this is the first one I found looking more to the East.