I found an interesting video showing operations in SBB’s Limmattal humpyard in Spreitenbach, Switzerland. This is SBB’s busiest humpyard and serves the Zurich area. This humpyard probably sorts more cars than any humpyard in the US. Later in the video you can see the mechanical mules in action trimming the bowl tracks without the need for a switch engine. This technology is fairly common in major European humpyards, but it isn’t used in any humpyards in North America to my knowledge.
That’s just freakin’ awesome - thanks so much for sharing !!! [bow]
About 4 mins. 27 secs. long. So far I’ve only viewed it once, but here are some comments:
[quote user=“Paul_D_North_Jr”]
At about 1 min. 45 secs. some yard workers can be seen apparently taking their lives in their hands - or feet - by crossing between cuts that are not all that far apart . . . 
I don’t think I’d be doing that !
Some of the cars/ cuts seem to be moving faster than the ones just ahead, closing the distance between them. That doesn’t leave much time to throw the switches between them - some sharp work and ‘heads-up ball’ there
[quote user=“Paul_D_North_Jr”]
That’s just freakin’ awesome - thanks so much for sharing !!! 
About 4 mins. 27 secs. long. So far I’ve only viewed it once, but here are some comments:
At about 1 min. there’s an ‘‘Oops!’’ moment when a large gray car either hung up or had to be stopped, retrieved, and rehumped. 
At about 1 min. 45 secs. some yard workers can be seen apparently taking their lives in their hands - or feet - by crossing between cuts that are not all that far apart . . . I don’t think I’d be doing that !
What? This isn’t real-time?
I don’t think I’ll show this to anyone at work; the wrong people might get ideas!
My computer seems to have a few problems with the video; I couldn’t get too far into it. So I didn’t see the “mules”. As for cut length, we often do longer than that, but have to give the pin-puller a bit of assistance with the slack on those (not a problem–what I hate is when they want some slack for cuts of three or four cars, or even less).
As for cars getting closer to or further away from other cars, that’s something we can do. I will try to give the people in the lower towers as much space between cars as possible, which mean that I’ll be actually stopping cars for a while in the secondary retarders. If I can’t stop them due to following cars, I can still slow them up, and it will look like the next car down would hit them. It doesn’t. But I often hear my two favorite words to hear while humping a train: “Thanks, Carl!”
We are also handling cars considerably larger and heavier than those in this video.
Other’n that, this video gives a good idea of what goes on at a hump yard. I don’t know that ours would be as spectacular as that, because the “spread” isn’t as dramatic on most of our shoves. Just before we got off today, we were humping a shove in which nearly 80 percent of the cars went to just two classification tracks. That isn’t as easy to handle as it would seem.
Had to watch it twice. Truly good video.[:)]