Last (?) Road Trip with Rose the Tiny Tent Camper; Part the Second
At age 80, a camping road trip may have been ill-advised… Notwithstanding, there I wuz —
The Golden Spike Tower and the Bailey Yard, North Platte, Nebraska.
This is part two of the Road Trip saga, now with more locomotives.
The Bailey Yard is the World’s Largest Marshaling (Classification) Yard. Union Pacific Railroad, North Platte, Nebraska.
When you arrive, you park beneath the Golden Spike Tower. The parking lot is generously sized, but I have never been here on a weekend. On weekdays there are very few cars and plenty of space to park with a trailer. It is less than a ten-minute drive from Cody Park, and I think worth a couple of hours touring the museum and taking in the view from one of the two observation decks. The upper one is entirely enclosed for wind or weather or if you have a problem with heights. The deck below has a nearly chest-high railing for security (I have some acrophobia myself) but allows shooting without intervening glass. It doesn’t wrap all the way around, though.
This was my third or maybe fourth visit to this fascinating place. It is a short drive from the mighty Challenger to the Golden Spike Tower and its spectacular panoramic view of the World’s Largest Classification (or marshaling) Yard. This is where trains are made up, pulled apart, cars redirected, and whatever else is needed to ensure your freight gets to its proper destination. Such a yard is a critical piece of the railroading puzzle used worldwide.
The Golden Spike is a reference to the joining of the first transcontinental railroad in May 1869.
The golden spike (also known as The Last Spike) is the ceremonial 17.6-karat gold final spike driven by Leland Stanford to join the rails of the First Transcontinental Railroad across the United States connecting the Central Pacific Railroad from Sacramento and the Union Pacific Railroad from Omaha on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory. The term last spike has been used to refer to one driven at the usually ceremonial completion of any new railroad construction projects, particularly those in which construction is undertaken from two disparate origins towards a common meeting point. The spike is now displayed in the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. — Wikipedia
The Golden Spike Tower’s architecture is meant to resemble a rail spike. It may surprise you (it did me) that the tower is not the Bailey Yard’s control tower but a museum and observation tower overlooking the vast Bailey Yard. The yard’s working control tower is somewhere out on the yard, but I’ve never figured out where.
A classification yard or marshalling yard (Brit/Canadian) or shunting yard (Central Europe) is a railway yard found at some freight train stations, used to separate railway cars onto one of several tracks. First the cars are taken to a track, sometimes called a lead or a drill. From there the cars are sent through a series of switches called a ladder onto the classification tracks. Larger yards tend to put the lead on an artificially built hill called a hump to use the force of gravity to propel the cars through the ladder. [Bailey is a hump yard.]
Freight trains that consist of isolated cars must be made into trains and divided according to their destinations. Thus the cars must be shunted several times along their route in contrast to a unit train, which carries, for example, cars from the plant to a port, or coal from a mine to the power plant. This shunting is done partly at the starting and final destinations and partly (for long-distance-hauling) in classification yards. — Edited from Wikipedia
Ironically, kids are not allowed to play on the kid-sized train. I conclude it is considered a sculpture but gee whiz fellas, if I am a kid, I’m gonna strain at the leash to get on it or in it. Much of the lumber appears to be retired railroad ties, so maybe their insurance doesn’t cover splinters.
Every trip, I have made a handheld stitched panorama of what I can see of the yard. This 2022 version is made with my A6400 and E 55–210mm f4.5–6.3 OSS. It may be slow, but it is one of my sharpest lenses at any aperture. I think I made eight frames from left to right. On Medium, this may not look as sharp as I know it is.
This is a link to the full-size panorama on Flickr. If you go there on a computer or tablet (not sure about phones) and click twice on the image, it will enlarge to its full scale, and you can drag it around to better see what I saw.
THANKS for reading and looking! I really do appreciate it! 😊👍
