YCGL - Day 31 - April 30, 2024 - Home Again, Naturally

 I started the day going up in the Golden Spike Tower at the Bailey Classification Yard in North Platte, NE.  

The purpose of a classification yard is to take a train coming into the yard and sort the cars to make up trains to go to different locations.  Consider a train coming from Cheyenne.  It may be made up of cars from any state south, west and north of Cheyenne.  Say five cars from Phoenix may need to go to three locations on the east coast.  Three cars from Portland need to go to three east coast cities.  Those eight cars are joined and travel together from Cheyenne.  When they reach here, the cars are uncoupled and then pushed over a 34 foot high hill, called the "hump",and they can run down off the hill and be diverted to 64 tracks to make up trains to go to different locations.  

The trains come in on the tracks on the upper left hand side of the photo.  The cars get routed to the yellow tracks where they are uncoupled from each other.  Then a switcher engine pushes the cars up and over the hump (which are the two black lines just to the left of center).  Then each car rolls down the hump under gravity to switched to one of the the 64 blue lines that make up the trains going to specific locations.  Then a locomotive on the right hand side will back up to the string of cars and couple with them and head out towards Omaha.  On a typical day, they will route just under 3,000 rail cars per day from 150 trains per day.

The blue arrow points to cars being pushed up the hump.  The red arrow points to cars on top of the hump.  The orange arrow points to two tanker cars rolling down the hump to be directed to one of the tracks in the fore ground.  

The yard is vast.  This is less than half.  This is a part of the east bound yard.  The west bound yard is bigger.

This is the largest classification yard in the world.  

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Anyway, I'm home, safe and sound.  I've had a 30-40 mph headwind the whole way which made it interesting, but I'm here.   

Now, I've got a lot of writing to do....