North Platte

I've fallen a little behind in documenting my travels but I have an opportunity this morning to catch-up as I head towards Ouray, Colorado. I'm currently sitting in The Bean, a fanciful cafe on Main Street in Gunnison, Colorado, dining on a veggie breakfast burrito (black beans, cheddar cheese, potatoes, green chilis, and salsa) and sipping a toasty cup of coffee. Last night, I stayed in Salida, Colorado, about two hours and a mountain pass away from Gunnison. I ended up in Salida after an exhilarating nighttime drive through the mountains from Colorado Springs.

On Wednesday, my main goal--in which I succeeded--was driving from Lincoln to Denver. It was about eight hours of driving and the scenery for most of the drive wasn't particularly notable. Amazingly, as soon as you cross from Nebraska into Colorado, the scenery rapidly changes. It goes from flat, endless cornfields to rumbling hills dotted with rickety windmills, weathered shacks, and muscular cattle. It didn't hurt that I entered Colorado just as the sun was setting and was greeted by a hazy swirl of blue, yellow, pink, and purple.

My one non-gas, non-bathroom stop along the way was in North Platte, Nebraska, home to the Bailey Switching Yard, the world's largest train switching station. One of the elderly volunteers at the Union Pacific Railroad Museum in Council Bluffs had told me there was a tower in North Platte that allowed visitors to gaze out on all the train switching action going on on below. I thought it'd be a good way to break up the monotony of the long drive so three and a half hours outside of Lincoln I pulled off I-80 into North Platte.

I was the only visitor at the Golden Spike Tower at the Bailey Yard this past Wednesday afternoon, which meant that I had the one volunteer train expert all to myself. According to Eldon, the friendly, fluffy white-sideburned volunteer who had once been a technician that serviced the trains at the Bailey Yard and now taught a course on trains at the local community college, the 24/7 switching yard was used to sort train cars and engineers there put together 150 trains per day on average.

Most of what passes through the yard is coal chugging from Wyoming to power plants on the East Coast although the trains at the yard also ship cars, grain, and pretty much everything else besides cattle and people. In most cases, the power plants own the cars and rent access to the yard. Each train car can hold 100-150 tons of coal, but loses about 500 pounds en route from the mines to the power plants on the East Coast. This is a series economic and environmental problem that Eldon sees a lot of profit in being able to address.

I asked Eldon if the number of trains passing through the switching yard was correlated with how well the economy was doing. He said, absolutely, yes. This past August and September he said traffic at the yard really picked up--a positive economic signal. Traffic is the historically slowest in the winter months of February and March. Maybe Ben Bernanke should give Eldon a call when attempting to discern the course of the U.S. economy.