Bailey Yard

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Bailey Yard is the world’s largest railroad classification yard. It’s in North Platte, Nebraska, owned and operated by Union Pacific. The yard is named after Edd H. Bailey, a former UP president, and sits roughly halfway between Denver and Omaha.

The site covers about 2,850 acres, is more than 8 miles long and up to 2 miles wide. It has 200 tracks, about 315 miles of track, 985 switches, 766 turnouts, and 17 receiving and 16 departure tracks. Each day, around 139 trains and 14,000 railroad cars pass through, with about 3,000 cars sorted daily using two hump yards. The eastbound hump is 34 feet tall and the westbound hump is 20 feet tall. Cars are sorted into 114 bowl tracks (49 westbound, 65 eastbound) to form trains for destinations across North America.

Bailey Yard also includes three locomotive fueling and servicing centers, a diesel shop, a car repair facility, and an in-motion ultrasound wheel detector—the only one of its kind. A field method lets four workers swap wheel assemblies on empty westbound coal trains in minutes, not days. Locomotives can be serviced in about 45 minutes in a Run-Thru, without detaching them from their trains. The yard is seen as an “economic barometer of America” due to the large amount of goods it handles. Adjacent to the yard, the Golden Spike Tower & Visitor Center offers safe public viewing of the operations.

North Platte began as a railroad town after the 1860s, once known as “Hell on Wheels.” The area’s yard expanded over the years: after World War II it became a 42-track hump yard, a 64-track hump yard was added in 1968, a diesel shop opened in 1971, and a car shop in 1974. In 1980 the old hump yard was replaced with a 50-track yard. In 1995, Bailey Yard was recognized as the largest rail yard in the world and has been featured on TV shows like Modern Marvels.