Golden Spike Tower

According to the brochure from the visitor’s center, Bailey Yard is “the world’s largest train yard.” I don’t find that hard to believe. Here’s a diagram of the tracks in the yard.

This is the locomotive repair shop. It’s about the size of three football fields and crews there can repair 750 engines a month.

Here’s a model of the interior of the repair shop.

To the right of the repair shop is the sand tower and the east bowl tracks. You can barely see the hump in the background.

Sand is dumped from the engine onto the track if an engine begins to lose traction. Cars are pushed over the hump and allowed to roll down into any one of the 64 tracks in the bowl according to where those cars are headed. The upturn at the far end of the bowl helps keep the cars from rolling too far.

Here we see the east end of the bowl with engines in front sitting on the ready track. These are the engines that will eventually pull out the east bound cars making trains for various destinations.

And this is the East Route Tower where a yardmaster controlls the makeup and departure of those trains.

This is Bailey Yard Headquarters where the superintendent, dispatchers, managers, and train crews gather to do or prepare for their work.

If you’d like to see all that for yourself but you don’t have a camera as good as Dave’s, don’t fret. You can watch it all on the live video feed from the yard.

Last, but not of the least importance to us, here is our home in the visitor center’s parking lot as seen from the tower.

Dave has just finished packing us up for another day of travel in our home so I must go now. I hope you enjoyed your tour of the Union Pacific’s Bailey Yard in North Platte, Nebraska.

TTYL,

Linda

Does anybody really know what time it is?

Does anybody really care? Today we do.

Today’s travel plan includes a stop in North Platte, Nebraska, to spend some time at the Union Pacific’s Golden Spike Tower and Visitor Center. This tower overlooks Bailey Yard which is huge. The UP has encouraged rail fans to stop and see their yard for years and we have done so before but this particular tower is new to us.

Wanting to allow plenty of time there, I went to bed early last night so I could get up early this morning thus having extra time in our day while still allowing us to get into our next overnight spot before traffic got bad.

Unfortunately, I had only been up a few minutes when Dave announced it was wasted effort since today is Sunday and the tower does not open until 1:00 pm on Sundays.

Oh, well. That just means I get to do my regular morning computer stuff this morning, right?

Wrong. Dave came in from hitching up the car and went right to the maps. We’ll be crossing into the Central Time Zone between here and North Platte. We are now an hour behind schedule.

It’s not unusual for me to have no idea what time it is. At least I do know what day it is. The Sunday funnies told me that.

TTYL,

Linda

RV & RR Memories

Back in the early 90’s there was a time when we didn’t own a recreational vehicle. But the urge to travel was upon us.

So we visited a local RV dealer and asked if they ever rented their motorhomes. They said they would but it would not have bedding or dishes. We could supply those so we rented what turned out to be a brand new Class C for three weeks and headed west.

We took U.S. Highway 2 which takes the same route as the then Burlington Northern Railway stopping at places of interest to us along the way. One of those places was Havre, Montana, then headquarters of the BN.

There we met a PR guy and talked trains. We told him about our then current model railroad, the Midland Industrial, and my fictional history of it.

“History of the Midland Industrial Railroad

The Midland Industrial Railroad came into being in the early 1970s when the Burlington Northern merger made the BN owners of trackage though several neighborhoods in the city of Midland. Since the BN prefers through traffic to local switching, they sold fifteen miles of former CBQ tracks, from Dowling Yard to Isle Yard, to the Midland Industrial Railroad, retaining the right to run their coal trains through to serve the power plant in the Essex neighborhood. The BN also sold several Great Northern locomotives to the Midland Industrial.”

He was surprised at how real my history sounded. He said it sounded just like what the BN would have done.

If you are interested, you can read more about our Midland Industrial at Midland Industrial.

Once we reached the west coast we dropped down to U.S. Highway 30 for the trip back east thus following the Union Pacific Railroad.

What brought all this to mind? Today we stopped for lunch in Green River, Wyoming, which brought back memories of our stop there all those years ago.

That time we stopped at the huge freight yard in Green River. They have a bridge that crosses their yard where Dave decided he’d go to take pictures. While waiting for him, I sat down on a bench outside the yard office. A fellow came outside several times while I was sitting there. He turned out to be a UP conductor waiting for the yard to assemble his local train. We talked a little and he asked me which direction we were traveling. I said east and he went away. Shortly he returned with a multi-page printout of the manifest for a train that would be heading our direction that he thought we might enjoy chasing. The next time he came out he was astonished to see me actually reading the manifest. When he realized how much I was into this stuff he went back in the office and came out again with more stuff for me including a current timetable, a book of track spots, and a plastic holder into which crews put their switch lists while working to protect them from the elements. I wish I’d asked the guys name. He sure made my day!

And I enjoyed it all over again today just remembering it.

TTYL,

Linda

Salty Utah

Stopping along Interstate 80 eastbound at the Salduro rest area at mile marker 10 gets you this:

Eastbound travelers have a raised platform they can use to help them see over the trucks in the rest area.

Westbound travelers could just walk past their trucks.

Continuing east we come to the Great Salt Lake another place so huge you feel like you can see the curvature of the earth.

To infinity and beyond!

TTYL,

Linda

Rerouting

“Rerouting,” is what my GPS says when we take a turn off our preplanned route. Those of you who’ve been following my blog know I said we were going to be leaving California via Highway 101 north. If, however, you check the map that shows where we are you will find us far from there. And if you noted the location of the campgrounds I complained about in my last blog you will have a clue as to which direction we did take.

So here, for Gary France’s A Blogger’s Centerline Day photo challenge (http://garysusatour.blogspot.com/2011/04/abcd-will-you-take-part.html) is a picture of my foot pointing towards the centerline of Interstate Highway 80 as we travel east through Nevada in our motorhome.

No, I don’t normally put my foot up there. It’s much too far away. I had to slouch way down in my seat to reach that far but the rules of the challenge said at least part of me had to be in the picture so what you see here is me engaging in risky behavior. Not very risky, though since there was no traffic anywhere near us. If one of those famous I-80 wind gusts had happened to come along just then, though, you might have seen a picture Dave took of me rolling in the aisle after having been dumped from my precarious perch. Fortunately, the wind gusts came both before and after I did my slouching bit for the world of bloggers while I was safely buckled into my seat.

For those of you new to this blog, we live full-time in a 35-foot motorhome traveling all over the U.S.A. At the moment we are headed to Minnesota but we have a ways to go yet before we get there–1607.82 miles according to my mapping software. Since we only drive a couple hundred miles a day it will take us at least a week to get there. I hope all those days turn out to be as pleasant as this one.

TTYL,

Linda