Snowy Night
by Sylvia Thornton
Title
Snowy Night
Artist
Sylvia Thornton
Medium
Photograph - Photograph Digital
Description
Locomotives at Union Pacific's Bailey yards, North Platte, Nebraska
The gigantic Bailey Yard is midway between Chicago and Salt Lake City and halfway between Denver and Omaha.[1] It covers a total expanse of 2,850 acres (11.5 km2) and is over 8 miles (13 km) in length and 2 miles (3.2 km) wide. The yard has 200 separate tracks totaling 315 miles (507 km) of track, 985 switches, 766 turnouts,[2] and 17 receiving and 16 departure tracks.[3] Union Pacific employs more than 2,600 people in North Platte,[1] most of whom are responsible for the day-to-day operations of Bailey Yard.
An average of 139 trains and over 14,000 railroad cars[3] pass through Bailey Yard every day, and the yard sorts approximately 3,000 cars daily using the yard�s two humps. The eastbound hump is a 34 feet (10 m)-tall mound and the westbound hump is 20 feet (6.1 m) high. These are used to sort four cars a minute into one of the 114 "bowl" tracks, 49 tracks for the westbound trains and 65 for eastbound.[1] The bowl tracks are used to form trains headed for destinations across North America, including the East, West and Gulf coasts of the United States, and Canadian and Mexican borders.[3]
The yard also includes a locomotive fueling and servicing center that handles more than 8,500 locomotives per month, a locomotive repair shop that can repair 750 locomotives monthly,[2] and a car repair facility that handles nearly 50 cars daily. The car repair shop replaces 10,000 pairs of wheels each year. The yard features an in-motion wheel defect detector developed by Union Pacific that uses ultrasound technology to inspect each wheel. It is the only such detector in the world.[3] UP has also developed a method for changing wheels in the field on empty westbound coal trains, which enables three workers to use a hydraulic jack under the couplers between two cars and exchange the trucks.[2] This has reduced the time needed to replace trucks from up to 12 days to 8�12 minutes.[2]
Locomotives can be serviced in a NASCAR-like pit stop facility staffed by five crew members�an electrician, machinist, fireman, oiler, and car inspector.[2] Locomotives are serviced in 45 minutes without detaching them from their trains.[4]
Because of the enormous amount of products that pass through Bailey Yard, Union Pacific describes the yard as an �economic barometer of America.�[1]
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February 9th, 2014
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