Monday - Today was a travel day to North Platte, NE, about 310 miles. We left the Hart Ranch RV park around 9:30 or so. Thank you, again, Brad and Elaine for sponsoring us at the membership park. The dash air is not working at all so around noon, we started the generator and the roof A/C unit. It’s better than nothing but doesn’t cool the cab area very well.
The RV park in North Platte isn’t fancy but the price is reasonable for full hookups. It’s next to the big train yard but the noise isn’t too bad…
Tuesday - We visited the Golden Spike Tower, which overlooks the Bailey Yard. This is the largest train switch yard processing over 1,500 train cars per day. Processing means separating individual train cars as they arrive and building up new trains based on the destination.
It doesn’t look like it in the picture but each of the two yards (one for eastbound and the other westbound) has 64 parallel tracks for building up the trains.
There is a lot of activity and all of the sorting and switching is done by computers after reading the bar codes on the individual cars. The incoming trains are routed over a “hump” where the coupler is released, and the car coasts into the yard with a computer switching in onto the correct track. Retarders control the cars speed into the yard to prevent hard bumps.
This is the Golden Spike Tower which has an open air platform at the 7th floor and an enclosed space above that. Lots of information and is listed as a “must visit” for North Platte.
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