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Bailey Yard

Bailey Yard is the world’s largest railroad classification yard. It sorts, services and repairs locomotives and cars headed all across North America. Bailey Yard is located in North Platte, Nebraska. The yard is named after former Union Pacific president Edd H. Bailey.

The gigantic Bailey Yard is midway between Chicago and Salt Lake City. The yard has 200 separate tracks, 985 switches, 766 turnouts, and 17 receiving and 16 departure tracks. Union Pacific employs more than 2,600 people in North Platte, most of whom are responsible for the day-to-day operations of Bailey Yard.

An average of 139 trains and over 14,000 railroad cars pass through Bailey Yard every day, and the yard sorts approximately 3,000 cars daily using the yard’s two humps. These are used to sort four cars a minute into one of the 114 "bowl" tracks (49 tracks for the westbound trains and 65 for eastbound). The bowl tracks are used to form trains headed for destinations across North America and Canadian and Mexican borders.

The yard also includes a locomotive fueling and servicing center that handles more than 8,500 locomotives per month, a locomotive repair shop that can repair 750 locomotives monthly, and a car repair facility that handles nearly 50 cars daily. The car repair shop replaces 10,000 pairs of wheels each year. The yard features an in-motion wheel defect detector developed by Union Pacific that uses ultrasound technology to inspect each wheel. It is the only such detector in the world. Union Pacific has also developed a method for changing wheels in the field on empty westbound coal trains, which enables three workers to use a hydraulic jack under the couplers between two cars and exchange the trucks. This has reduced the time needed to replace trucks from up to 12 days to 8–12 minutes.

Locomotives can be serviced in a NASCAR-like pit stop facility staffed by five crew members—an electrician, machinist, fireman, oiler, and car inspector. Locomotives are serviced in 45 minutes without detaching them from their trains.