Bailey Yard: The Biggest Railroad in the World

You have just passed through or near the largest railroad classification yard on Earth. Bailey Yard in North Platte, Nebraska, covers two thousand eight hundred and fifty acres, stretches eight miles end to end, and contains three hundred and fifteen miles of track, enough to reach from here east to Omaha with plenty to spare.

The story starts in eighteen sixty-six, when Union Pacific chief engineer Grenville Dodge laid out North Platte as a division point on the first transcontinental railroad. The location was chosen for its reliable water supply and its distance from the previous division at Grand Island. North Platte became, in the parlance of the era, a railroad town, meaning almost everything here existed to support the railroad.

Over the following century the yard grew. A modernized retarder yard that opened in nineteen forty-eight, then expanded in nineteen sixty-eight, became the tool that made Bailey the world's largest classification facility. Named for former Union Pacific president Edd H. Bailey, the yard processes an average of one hundred and thirty-nine trains and more than fourteen thousand railroad cars every single day. Two humps, mounded grades, one thirty-four feet tall and one twenty feet, allow gravity and computer-controlled retarders to sort four cars per minute into one of one hundred and fourteen bowl tracks, each track assigned to a specific destination.

The Golden Spike Tower and Visitor Center in North Platte lets you watch this from seven stories up. Most people who stop are not railroad enthusiasts. They just end up mesmerized. There is something genuinely hypnotic about watching four hundred tons of steel being sorted at walking pace by a system that operates twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, in Nebraska blizzards and July heat alike, moving the commercial contents of a continent east and west across the plains.