Didn’t get much modeling done this weekend… …why?
I spent the weekend at UP’s Railfest in North Platte, NE, home of Bailey Yard (the world’s largest classification yard). We even scored a 2-hour guided bus tour of the yard. I blogged about it here:
http://vollmertrainblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/larger-than-life-ups-bailey-yard.html
Here’s a sample:
Very cool. I went on one of the prototype tours of Colton hump yard during the NMRA convention in July. Colton looks like a dwarf compared to Baily Yard. What did you think about The Golden Spike Tower?
Dave, I’mad at you!! You’re a Pennsy fan and there are more UP locos in your first pic than I’ve ever seen!!! I’ve read that the Bailey yard is the world’s largest. How long were you able to spend there? I’ll bet it wasn’t enough! Are you still going to model Conrail? They didn’t even have Big Boys!![swg]
Dave
Thanks for the pictures of Bailey yard. That shot of the hopper car getting a wheel change reminds me of something on an HO or N scale layout. We sort of do that in an emergency operation sometimes.
Are you starting your new layout yet or still planning??
CAZEPHYR
Your presence 250 miles from home indicates that you recovered from your recent malady.
You are in an ideal location for railfanning. When I was at Leftover Field in Mass. back in the '60s there was a major in my club who was flying KCs and had come there a couple of years before from Salina, Kansas. He had quite a gallery of photographs. Salina was on the old Kansas Pacific line to Denver but apparently it didn’t really carry too much traffic. A hundred or so miles north was the Q’s Denver main and fifty miles beyond that was Onion Specific’s overland route. Most of his photographs were taken on the Santa Fe’s trackage across central Kansas or on Rock Island’s Golden State Route.
The Golden Spike is a very nice addition to the yard and a great public relations tool for Union Pacific.
Rest assured, folks, that I am still a Pennsy/Conrail fan and there are no current plans for yellow diesels or articulated steam to appear on my layout!
…and nope, no plans to start new layout construction at least until I retire from the USAF, which at a minimum is 7.5 years down the road.
The Golden Spike is not a Union Pacific thing. It is a private undertaking. I was VERY bumbed out when I found out they charged for it. If it was just me it wouldn’t have been bad to but to pay for all the kids who looked at the trains for about 5 minutes and then were ready to go… Not to mention that UP has now torn down the old FREE observation tower.
C’mon, Dave; you and I both know that seven and a half years down the road you’ll be a Chicken Colonel with the smell of that first star so pungent in your nostrils that you’ll murder anyone who even thinks “retirement” in the same room as you!!!
On the other than when I visited Enola in the late 1970’s, there was a dead line behind the shops with a bunch of UP SD24B’s in it.
In the early 1980’s I rode Amtrak from St Louis to Phillie and while going between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg we passed trains with both UP and ATSF power on them.
Never say never.
Dave H.