so let's get on a motor coach bus, nice touch, not a school bus, with the vice president of terminal operations for bailey yard as our tour guide on the pa system, and let's get a pretty up close and personal tour of the world's largest rail classification yard, we start off entering the yard by crossing the lead tracks for the diesel shop, a facility we will get to later
the person at the switch is part of the trim crew, that is a yard crew that assembles outbound trains, checks them to make sure all the connections are in place, moves the road power into position, and makes it all ready for the road crew to leave
here we have eastbound trains, including one that has the road power attached, which probably means it's soon departing, these are called ladder tracks which funnel down behind me into the departure leads, which further move through switches joining the 3 track mainline heading east, which are off to my right.
cars rolling down the hump, moving by computer run switches into the bowl tracks to join into newly made up trains, when all goes well, which it really usually does, magnetic retarders slow the car down based on its weight and destination so that it joins the back of cars already on the bowl track just hard enough to set the knuckle coupler, not hard enough to have derailments or car/cargo damage. thus you see DO NOT HUMP on some kinds of passing railcars in trains, not a dog reference. the computer gets it's information from rifd transmitters on the sides of the cars now, being read by trackside scanners, several sets of them on the east and west sides of bailey, up to as much as 25 miles away, so when that train reaches bailey it's been scanned, and that has all been compared and verified to the original manifest sent from the yard that last made up that train
i never did get a clear shot of him, but hidden by the smaller tower there is a yard crew person pulling the pins to uncouple the cars, the brake air hoses then breakaway, controlling the yard engines pushing this train up the hump with a belt pack radio controller, much like what one would use on an rc model or perhaps a drone, just with a lot more horsepower and tractive effort, the hump sets are 2-3 older road models, usually 2000 or so rated horsepower each.
diesel servicing pads, kind of like a giant pit stop, although slower, fuel, sand, water and oil checked, bathroom supplied and hopefully cleaned. if it's a run-through the power stays on and once it's done the new road crew hops in and off it goes, the daily ups train and the 3 x weekly salad shooter from the california produced valleys with west coast fruit cars may be here as little as 20 minutes, the company is paid a big premium for these to be the hottest trains on the line
there is even a flyover track to allow engines and cars to be moved from one side of the yard across to the other
some of the runthroughs do not even need servicing and pause here just long enough to change crews
coal movements are way down, but a lot of powder river basin coal from wyoming still gets moved through bailey, on it's way to either domestic power plants or to the east coast export piers. enough so that the coal trains have their own servicing and engine change area, coal moves in unit trains, 100-110 cars long, and they move through their own shop over here, where without losing the time to uncouple or take out a bad order car, it can be lifted in place, a bad wheel set pulled out, a new one slid under, and the unit train sent on it's way with minimal delay
here is one end of that car house
empty unit coal trains awaiting crews, crew districts for bailey are alliance yard in wyoming to the west, and omaha yard to the east
if i remember correctly the yard crew for the coal train facility named this, their work building, on their own
passing under the eastbound hump now on our way towards the diesel shop, i think this is the taller hump at 34 feet, the height is simply a reflection of how far the cars need to roll to the end of the furthest bowl track since they all roll at 2 miles an hour
still not seeing the pin puller, and i forgot to mention, they work one train, and then have one train off, since this happens 24/7 in every kind of weather, including sleet and snow.
the yardmasters tower, the overall yard superintendent has their office here along with some support staff and computer facilities
some of the many locomotives awaiting or finished in the shop, up was one of the first large class 1 roads to standardize on a design, the sd70 for many years, reaping the benefits in less variety of parts to stock, less manuals to have online for shop craft to have to scroll through, less amounts of training for the various crafts to take, simplifying service and reducing service time as crafts became totally familiar with the parts they service. and modern diesel railroad locomotives have been state of the art plug in diagnostics for some time
service bay entrances
and all those road diesels get shoved around into and out of the shop line by this little hard working switcher
and that concludes our yard tour, we stopped here on the way out to give folks a little break and a chance to see the tower if they had not already done so
next post is something different, something quite unexpected, a nice little add on to this trip
