Roadside Attractions: The Golden Spike Tower's Tift Lot
The Golden Spike Tower's Tift Lot is a unique roadside attraction situated in North Platte, Nebraska, United States of America, within the Union Pacific Railroad's Bailey Yard complex. This strategically significant location offers visitors an unparalleled opportunity to witness the backbone of America's railroad system and a vital hub of the country's freight transportation network.
Upon closer inspection, the Tift Lot's origins date back to the early 1900s. Named after Union Pacific's president Jacob Shelmadine, and later known as the Tift Lot in honor of Patrick Tift, the lot played a critical role in BNSF's – and predecessor railroad Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy – coal car storage system. In contrast to many transportation historians who have thoroughly examined larger railroad classification yards, like Bailey Yard and Barstow Yard, a peculiarly defined study would be this rail yard's significance in the operational history of North Platte.
The Tift Lot – originally comprising around forty tracks arranged around an extensive classification yard complex – acted primarily as storage space for empty coal cars arriving from destination stations around the country. Considering the railcars spent about twenty percent of the rail journey towards reaching power plants returning empty to the mines, thus the coal mining region around Wyoming's coal country was essentially supplied by Union Pacific's regional railroad transportation system. The information reveals the Tift lot was designed to handle 1.2 million cars – serving power plants that consumed nearly one hundred thousand tons of coal on a monthly basis.
During its prime, a wide array of power plant coal operations – including the James River Coal Units and Union Pacific Power Company, the nearby Kingsley Station, owned and operated by Southern Kansas, and others like MonGen – heavily relied on the large delivery facility as most had the 125 yards maximum freight storage limit; suggesting that a large majority utilized services of Bailey's gigantic complex. However, in conjunction with UPRR utilizing modernized, big-data based transportation techniques such as real time freight load information, the lot significantly decreased as an important coal-cars classification storage yard as more efficient scheduling operations greatly reduced storage volumes by providing quick car unload at target consumption sites.
Although often overshadowed by other prominent roadside attractions in Nebraska, such as Carhenge, the Golden Spike Tower, which stands 182.9 feet tall, also happens to overlook the city of North Platte's largest draw – Union Pacific's Bailey Yard classification area, covering 4.9 million square feet of combined land area and provides a pivotal part of UPRR's massive intermodal transport network. This location presents travelers passing by western Nebraska an opportunity to discover the intricacies of a 'hidden world' as with the Tift Lot; revealing both its lesser-known history as well as significant importance in contributing effectively within America's large surface transportation infrastructure.
Travelers visiting can go see Tift Lot's much smaller successor South Tift Lot, part of the enormous classifications system; its railcar storage classification, along with many modern train yards found along larger networks throughout the country.
Furthermore, such attractions showcase key elements to visitors who are eager to better appreciate and understand past operational processes implemented throughout United States railroads; and their evolution within a constantly changing industry, where innovation and cutting-edge technology, fueling the efficiency the passenger industry utilizes in its evolving intermodal transportation systems, becomes an emphasis in railroad architecture.
Investigating a site that once employed an array of facilities for different, traditional rail cargo industries could likely yield multiple historical subtopics deserving review, in an age when transportation infrastructure modernization became the answer to a multitude of ever-present logistical puzzles faced by the entire transportation industry.
Upon closer inspection, the Tift Lot's origins date back to the early 1900s. Named after Union Pacific's president Jacob Shelmadine, and later known as the Tift Lot in honor of Patrick Tift, the lot played a critical role in BNSF's – and predecessor railroad Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy – coal car storage system. In contrast to many transportation historians who have thoroughly examined larger railroad classification yards, like Bailey Yard and Barstow Yard, a peculiarly defined study would be this rail yard's significance in the operational history of North Platte.
The Tift Lot – originally comprising around forty tracks arranged around an extensive classification yard complex – acted primarily as storage space for empty coal cars arriving from destination stations around the country. Considering the railcars spent about twenty percent of the rail journey towards reaching power plants returning empty to the mines, thus the coal mining region around Wyoming's coal country was essentially supplied by Union Pacific's regional railroad transportation system. The information reveals the Tift lot was designed to handle 1.2 million cars – serving power plants that consumed nearly one hundred thousand tons of coal on a monthly basis.
During its prime, a wide array of power plant coal operations – including the James River Coal Units and Union Pacific Power Company, the nearby Kingsley Station, owned and operated by Southern Kansas, and others like MonGen – heavily relied on the large delivery facility as most had the 125 yards maximum freight storage limit; suggesting that a large majority utilized services of Bailey's gigantic complex. However, in conjunction with UPRR utilizing modernized, big-data based transportation techniques such as real time freight load information, the lot significantly decreased as an important coal-cars classification storage yard as more efficient scheduling operations greatly reduced storage volumes by providing quick car unload at target consumption sites.
Although often overshadowed by other prominent roadside attractions in Nebraska, such as Carhenge, the Golden Spike Tower, which stands 182.9 feet tall, also happens to overlook the city of North Platte's largest draw – Union Pacific's Bailey Yard classification area, covering 4.9 million square feet of combined land area and provides a pivotal part of UPRR's massive intermodal transport network. This location presents travelers passing by western Nebraska an opportunity to discover the intricacies of a 'hidden world' as with the Tift Lot; revealing both its lesser-known history as well as significant importance in contributing effectively within America's large surface transportation infrastructure.
Travelers visiting can go see Tift Lot's much smaller successor South Tift Lot, part of the enormous classifications system; its railcar storage classification, along with many modern train yards found along larger networks throughout the country.
Furthermore, such attractions showcase key elements to visitors who are eager to better appreciate and understand past operational processes implemented throughout United States railroads; and their evolution within a constantly changing industry, where innovation and cutting-edge technology, fueling the efficiency the passenger industry utilizes in its evolving intermodal transportation systems, becomes an emphasis in railroad architecture.
Investigating a site that once employed an array of facilities for different, traditional rail cargo industries could likely yield multiple historical subtopics deserving review, in an age when transportation infrastructure modernization became the answer to a multitude of ever-present logistical puzzles faced by the entire transportation industry.
