North Platte

On our return trip in 2015, we had stayed in North Platte, but the viewing tower had been closed when I drove out early the next morning. And without the tower, it's very difficult to get a sense of the scale of what goes on here.

Union Pacific bills the Bailey Yard as the world's largest classification yard. It's a huge operation with two large humps to handle eastbound and westbound traffic. Hump yards refer to the way that freight cars are pushed one by one over an artificial hill, and then allowed to coast precisely onto any of a large number of classification tracks in the bowl from which new trains are built. I was mainly impressed by the number of big diesel locomotives moving around. Something like 130 trains a day pass through here.

M and I got together in part because of a shared interest in trains (at least it was one of our first conversation topics), but she just liked riding them. Little did she realize what an obsession trains were in my family! Of course, I don't even think of myself as a very serious train nut, but that's because I know just how much nuttier some folks can get. If the 8-mile complex was accurately modeled in HO (1:87), the resulting layout would need to be more than 500' long. In N-scale (1:160) it would still need to be almost as a long as a football field. In case you wondered!