Road Trip March - Day 14
March 26th 2026 (Thursday)
Today is simply drive, drive, drive to complete leg 2 of our road trip we have to be in Cheyanne, WY by Friday and we still have over 450 miles to go!! So an early start (for us) and its another beautiful day, but windy and the RV is getting buffeted along.
Whilst driving we had just had a discussion about how Nebraska (so far) seemed lacking in interesting things to do when suddenly I came across North Platte, located in Lincoln County, Nebraska. First and foremost they had a Starbucks coffee shop and I was in desperate need of one, purely medicinal you understand. I was still not very well and really all I wanted to do was climb back into bed, but we still had over 200 miles to cover.
During our much needed coffee stop I unexpectedly discovered Golden Spike Tower - now this was an exciting discovery!!
Golden Spike Tower is where you can watch the Union Pacific train yard. For a small fee, you can go up into the observation tower and look across Bailey Yard, the largest classification rail yard in the world - and it is collosal!! It covers 2,850 acres, reaching a total length of eight miles. It has 17 receiving and 16 departure tracks handling 14,000 rail cars every 24hrs. With it's special "hump yards" comprising mounds 34ft and 20ft high and you can see them in action in the video below. It sorts 3,000 rail cars daily by gravity to build up to 139 trains a day travelling east and west, north to Canada and south to Mexico.
The operation and repair shop is open 24hrs, 7 days a week fueling and servicing more than 8,500 locomotives each month! The place is MAHOOSIVE!! It is mesmerising to watch the constant movement, the sheer quantity of locos all in one place, bearing in mind each loco costs aprox 3 million dollars and there were hundreds here to see.
The guides available to talk to you are all retired train yard workers and they have so much information to share and stories to tell about the history of the area and how it came about. There is an open air observation deck outside, perfect for train spotting and taking pictures. Unfortunately when we visited the wind had not eased and was blowing a gale and it was incredibly hard to stay still to take pictures. But if you are in the area or really like trains, Union Pacific in particular, then this is the place to visit!
But the road beckoned and we still had 200 miles to go before we reached our destination in Cheyanne. We had booked ourselves into the campsite Cheyenne Sky RV Park for the next few days, this campsite is reasonably priced with really nice facilities and ideally located for our planned excusions over the next few days.
So, we finally reached Cheyanne and had entered the state of Wyoming, leaving Nebraska behind. We were quite pleased to do as Nebraska is flat and pretty boring to drive through, certainly on the Interstate 80, and not a state we'll be returning to in a hurry - no disrespect to Fred's fellow Nebraskans!
Road Trip Day 14 - We have driven aprox 485 miles
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