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Janet and Lincoln
This dog is adorable. Good tempered and fun to be around. We stopped in North Platte to visit our good friends Janet & Bob Luedtke. We have been friends for 35 years. We both met in Denver and shared many good times. She and her husband Bob retired, sold their company and moved to North Platte, Nebraska a couple of years ago. Bob loves to hunt and fish and Janet is doing dog rescue. She also has a new rescue named "Sammy" and I have enclosed several pictures of Sammy. He was abused and would not look a human being in the eyes. He is looking for a loving home and he is so beautiful, half St. Bernard and half Collie..........beautiful animal. After a day or so he really warmed up to us and would shake hands and let us pet him. Wish I could have taken him home! They also have 3 other dogs, Golden retrievers, Gertie and Lincoln and a pointer named Lucy who hunts with Bob and is excellent at pointing out the birds!
Janet is also a wonderful cook and our first night there she cooked fresh pheasant that Bob shot hunting. Bob took Bill fishing at some of his local spots and they caught lots of
The North Spike Tower
A panoramic view of the Union Pacific's Bailey Yard will greet you from the two observation decks of the Golden Spike Tower. The eighth story fully enclosed viewing platform offers a 360 degree view of Bailey Yard and the Platte River valley. The seventh floor platform is open-air. The Guinness Book of World Records ceretifies Bailey Yard as the largest railroad yard, with a mind-boggling array of more than 315 miles of tracks, accommodating more than 150 trains a day. Even someone who knew nothing about trains would be fascinated with this facility. fish. They are wonderful people and we love them both very much. They have a beautiful new home and it was fun sharing time with them for a few days. It is always great to see friends and catch up on their lives!
Union Pacific Railroad's Bailey Yard in North Platte is the largest classification yard in the world, drawing railfans from all over the globe. The yard was named in honor of Edd H. Bailey, President of the Union Pacific Railroad from 1965-1971. This massive yard covers 2,850 acres, reaching a total length of eight miles, well beyond the borders of North Platte, a community of 24,500 citizens.
Every 24 hours, UPRR's Bailey Yard handles 15,000 railroad cars. Of those, 3,000 are sorted daily in the yard's eastward and westward yards, called "HUMPS", thus nicknamed "HUMP YARDS". Using a mound cresting 34 feet for eastbound trains and 20.1 for westbound, these two hump yards allow four cars a minute to roll gently into any of the 114 "bowl" tracks where they become part of trains headed for dozens of destinations. Together these two yards have over 50 recieving and departure tracks.
The heart of these yards
The Bailey Yards in North Platte, Nebraska
Union Pacific's Bailey Yard in North Platte is the largest classification yard in the world. is the hump; a lead track on a hill (HUMP) over which the cars are pushed by an engine. Single cars, or some coupled cars in a block, are uncoupled just before or at the crest of the HUMP and roll by gravity into their destination tracks in the classification bowl which is where the cars are sorted. As they roll down the hill, they go into an area of track where an engine going to that destination can pick them all up before leaving town.
The speed of the cars rolling down from the hump into the classification bowl must be regulated because of the different natural speed of the wagons (full or empty, heavy or light freight, number of axles),the different filling of the tracks (whether there are presently few or many cars on it ) and different weather conditions ( temperature, wind speed and direction). As concerns speed regulation there are two types of hump yards without or with mechanisation by retrarders. In the old non-retarder yeards braking was usually done in Europe by railroaders who lay skates onto the tracks, or in the USA by riders on the cars. In the modern retarder yards this
Heerrrreee's Sammy
Here is Sammy ! What a cutie! work is done by mechanized "rail brakes" called retarders. They are operated either pneumatically (e.g. in the USA, FRANCE, BELGIUM, RUSSIA or CHINA. or hydraulically.
Bailey yard also sports quite the diesel repair facility on it's grounds, providing one-stop" servicing to trains and a locomotive repair sholp. The mechanical forces at Bailey Yard fills locomotives with 14 million gallons of diesel fuel every month. The shop replaces 10,000 pairs of wheels yearly and has a fleet of trucks to repair small defects in the trains. The shop can repair 18 to 20 trains an hour, with shifts running 24/7. They fix 750 locomotives annually. Bailey Yard's goods tell the story of American commerce, for through the yard pass refrigerators, TV's, coal, automobiles, potatoes, fruit, wine, lumber, corn, sugar, steel, chemicals, and hundreds of other commodities used every day. AS Bailey Yard goes, so goes this nation, for it is an economic barometer of America.
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