Union Pacific’s Bailey Yard in North Platte, Neb., was named world’s largest rail yard by Guinness. The yard’s 2,850 acres includes two separate hump yards (eastbound and westbound) where freight cars are sorted and combined into new trains. From the top of the West Hump tower, watch cars move toward the crest of the hump, […]
Type of Train: Freight
BNSF diesels pass through Chillicothe, Iowa
Three BNSF Railway diesels pull train CATMCXEO-88 past Chillicothe, Iowa, on a snowless Dec. 4, 2006. The train is crossing BNSF’s busy ex-Chicago, Burlington & Quincy route across southern Iowa, a key coal route for BNSF. Photo by Craig Williams […]
Intermodal trains per day in 1984
Intermodal haulage on railroads initially resembled loose-car railroading: Cities of varying sizes had ramps that originated a few flatcars, which were added to merchandise freights. A trucker, though, could beat that service easily. Larger cities generated solid intermodal trains, but the cost of terminals, equipment, and operations made the business lucrative only in lanes of […]
Chicago tonnage by railroad: 1971 and 2000
Traffic density changes in the past 30 years on freight railroads’ main lines to Chicago reflect factors both geographic and corporate. Geographic factors include the shift of manufacturing from domestic to offshore; air quality regulations that closed high-sulfur Western mines; and general population and economic growth. Corporate factors include the desire of railroad managements to […]
Class I railroad work volume, 1978-2008
The undeniable triumph of U.S. railroading can be seen in this graph of revenue ton-miles: the most basic unit of measurement (hauling one ton of freight one mile) for the work railroads perform. The data for this illustration come from the Association of American Railroads, and are confined to Class I railroads, the largest group […]
Railroad bottlenecks in 2035
What will railroading look like 27 years from now? Will yards be jammed, main lines clogged, and trains backed up from terminals for 30 miles or more? Or will routes be fluid, with freights roaring by every 8 to 10 minutes on main lines three, four, and even six tracks wide? Either future could happen, […]
Burlington Route freight trains, 1947
If you want a glimpse of railroad operations six decades ago, this map of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy provides a window. It’s based on Burlington’s November 1947 freight train operating plan, a chart of schedules furnished to company officers. (Our map was modified to put eastbounds and westbounds on one page and converted to […]
Natural resources in Kansas City Southern’s territory
This map of the Kansas City Southern and Louisiana & Arkansas (just prior to their 1939 operational merger) is based on a document undoubtedly produced by the KCS traffic department to show shippers the abundance of natural resources within the roads’ territory. KCS founder Arthur Stilwell had left his secure position with a Hartford insurance […]
Evolution of Canada’s grain network
Three distinct periods of railway construction created the grain-gathering network that served the farmers of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. The first 3,000 miles were built between 1881 and the onset of a depression in 1893. Better times returned in 1896, fueling an incredible boom that saw the construction of more than 11,000 route- miles by […]
Railroad tonnage by state in 2004
If you want to sense the impact of coal on the railroad industry, consider this: The state that ranks last in population — Wyoming, with a little more than 500,000 residents — originates one of every five tons of freight hauled by American railroads. The 419 million gross tons that began its journey in Wyoming […]
Railroad traffic over the Continental Divide
This is a snapshot of traffic across the Continental Divide in 1980 and 2000 on U.S. transcontinental routes. It’s inherent in map-making that accuracy gets sacrificed on the altar of clarity: traffic density is by no means uniform across the shaded line segments, and a slightly different picture would emerge were the snapshots taken in […]
Western power plants
Coal is the No. 1 rail-shipped commodity by tonnage in the U.S., and power plants consume most of it. Three key characteristics shape this map (see June 2002 Trains for the East, and January 2003 for the South): Population is concentrated in cities; most plants are mine-mouth or near the mine; and its most populous […]
