YCGL - Minnesota - Day 2 - Monday, April 18

 

I woke up at the crack of mid-morning and was at the Golden Spike Tower at the Union Pacific Yard  in North Platte, NE at 9:00!  As some of you know, I'm an old train buff (yes both ways interpreting), remembering taking the Rock Island RR from Houston to Owatonna, MN many summers when I was a kid.  Mike, Pete and I used to stand on the platforms between the cars with the Dutch doors open and get the smell of the diesel and the wind and the clackity-clack of the wheels going over the joints between the rails. (I won't mention spitting out the window and trying to hit the signs next to the track.  It was an excellent example of relative motion and a way to understand both the Doppler effect and the red shift in stars.  Travel can be so enlightening.)  The Tower has an open air observation deck at the seventh floor (cold and windy, but you can hear the noises below) and an enclosed observation room on the eight floor (warm).  The picture below is looking west at the east bound section of the yard (so the trains and cars are coming at you.)

The white building on the left is the engine maintenance building, where they will work on up to 150 locomotives per day.  The two towers in the middle are the sand hoppers.  A locomotive has a sand bin in it so that sand can be blown down onto the track to increase friction.  It's done automatically whenever the drive wheels slip on the track.  Then everything to the right is the east bound classification yard.  This area is called the bowl.  

A train will be made up of one to six engines and up to 138 cars.  The cars can be of various types, i.e. box cars, auto transporters, tankers, flat cars, etc.  They can originate at a number of different places and be bound for a number of other places.  These are referred to as Manifest trains.  Conversely, they can be all of one type, like coal trains and are called Unit trains.  

At some point (or at multiple points) in their journey, the Manifest cars must be divided from the original train and put together with another train going to its destination.  This process is called classification and the Bailey Yard at North Platte is the largest classification yard in the world, having a length of 8-1/2 miles and a width of 1-1/2 miles.  150 trains a day go through the yard.  

The Google Map below shows the east bound yard and the location of the Golden Spike Tower.

Cars come in from the left and are pushed by locomotives up "the hump", a 30 foot high hill made from the soil in the bowl.  At the top of the hump, the cars are decoupled and pushed down the hump into the bowl.  As it is rolling down the hump, the car goes through a series of switches which lead to the appropriate track for the trains destination.

The light colored building below is where the controllers decide which track a car should go on.  It rolls down the hump to the appropriate track.  A black tanker car is starting its journey (located between the two light poles).  Its speed is going to be a combination of the speed it is going over the hump, the slope of the hump and the weight of the car and its contents. If a car goes too fast, it will crash into the cars in front and could potentially push the cars out into the converging tracks.  This area is called the bowl because it is dug out to make the hump, so that the cars in the bowl have to go uphill to get out.  On the other hand, if a car is too slow, it won't reach the other cars and stops.  It then has to be pushed forward by the next cars behind it.  There are some brakes built into the rails to scrape along the side of the wheels and slow the car down to the appropriate speed.  So, all of this is done by gravity once the car goes over the hump.  

This is the full picture of the car coming down into the bowl.  They process four cars a minute doing this.  There are 64 tracks in this bowl.  If all the tracks were lined together, it would be greater than the distance from North Platte to Cheyenne.  

Four cars coming down the west bound hump.  

OK, I admit, I geeked out over this.  I was there with my binoculars (which I would highly recommend) and watched for two hours.  They have a former employee on the eighth floor to answer questions and explain the operation.  I hope now I have either gotten you excited enough to want to stop there for a while (it sure breaks up the drive across Nebraska which I find more boring than the drive across Wyoming that people like to complain about) or maybe you've learned all you didn't know you wanted to know about classification yards and you don't have to stop on your way.  

Well, if you decide not to stop there, maybe I can entice you with where I'm going to be tomorrow morning.  (And that, dear friends, is called the hook to get you to come back and read more.  Also called "foreshadowing, the sign of good cartooning." (Calvin and Hobbs or maybe Larson).)

Sleep well!