Golden Spike Tower and Bailey Yard

North Platte is home to the Union Pacific's main marshalling yard, where cars coming from the west get assembled into trains to various eastern destinations and vice versa. The yard is truly gigantic: 2500 employees, 2850 acres, 315 miles of track, 1200 rail cars handled daily, 9000 locomotives serviced monthly, and with and east and west "hump" that lead to 760 turn-outs.  In coming trains are broken up and the individual cars are pushed over a hump, the top of an elevation, from which they roll downhill and are switched,in a largely automated fashion, into the appropriate turn-out and the individual cars are reassembled into the outgoing trains.  All this was viewed from the top of the golden spike tower. These pictures can't capture the incredible size of this facility.