Once Upon a Town (19 page)

“You can't get
back here on your own.”

Deloyt Young, the retired manager of operations at the Union Pacific's Bailey Yard, was behind the wheel of his car. He had arranged to meet me in the parking lot of a convenience store out on a public road, and now he was taking me past checkpoints and guarded gates. We were still on the outskirts of North Platte, but it certainly didn't feel like it—this was a part of town that only the people who work inside its private fences regularly see.

“They turn people away who try to come in,” Young said. “This is a place for working, not for looking.”

It was astonishing—every foot of it. And in this town,
the town where the passenger trains stopped coming all those years ago, the existence of this place…

Think of it this way: What if O'Hare International Airport was set down here in North Platte, and no one ever talked about it? What if LAX was here, or Hartsfield?

That was the Bailey Yard. Ask a thousand people on the street, anywhere in the United States, what it is, and they are likely not to have the slightest idea. Unless they are railroad people.

The Bailey Yard—in North Platte—is the biggest railroad yard in the world.

In the town the passenger trains left behind.

It runs twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. It covers 2,850 acres—and stretches eight miles in length. The people who work there have figured out that if the University of Nebraska football team were to choose to play its games in the Bailey Yard, there would be room for 3,097 football fields.

What happens at the Bailey Yard is at the same time quite elementary, and almost impossibly complex. Freight trains heading east and west arrive here, pulling cars with cargo destined for different cities. But not all of those freight cars are supposed to end up where the locomotive is going to end up. One car on the train might have cargo that is supposed to be in Pittsburgh, one car on the train might have cargo that is supposed to be in St. Louis, one
car on the train might have cargo that is supposed to be in Detroit….

The locomotives can't just drop the freight cars off in the individual cities, like children in an after-school carpool. The railroads don't work like that. Classification yards are needed—places where the freight cars can be quickly and efficiently pulled off the trains they arrived on, and added to trains that will get them to where they are scheduled to end up. It's like shuffling a deck of the biggest and heaviest cards in the world—and the shuffling never stops.

“Come with me,” Deloyt Young said, easing his automobile up to the base of a tower that looked like something you might find at a major airport.

We climbed some steep metal stairs high into the tower, until we were looking out a large window. It was a humbling sight.

Railroad tracks everywhere—endless, jammed with trains from all parts of the United States, more trains than you have ever seen all at one time. A flurry of activity on every track—time was what mattered here, getting the cars switched and attached to the proper trains was the business of the Bailey Yard.

“We've got fifty westbound tracks and sixty-four eastbound tracks,” Young told me. “The man who controls all the traffic is called the humpmaster. There are three hun
dred fifteen miles of track in here. Every twenty-four hours, this yard handles twelve thousand railroad cars.”

I couldn't even see to the extremities of all the trains. This town that had been a part of America's greatest love affair with passenger railroad trains, this town that had given birth to the Canteen, this town that was unreachable by passenger railroad today…it was home to the biggest working railroad yard anywhere on the planet. With not a single paying passenger on any of those twelve thousand cars.

“It's simple,” Young told me. “They figured it out a long time ago. They can make more money off freight. It takes about half as many people to haul freight as it does to haul people. And the people all want to fly, anyway. They don't have time to ride the trains. At least they think they don't.”

 

But once they had no choice. Once, they didn't even know exactly where they were going.

“We weren't told,” said Edward J. Fouss, eight-one, who now lives in Eufala, Oklahoma. “We didn't know our destination. Not in those days. Loose lips sink ships.”

The Navy was sending him to the South Pacific in 1944, but had not informed him of that fact. All he knew was that he was on a troop train that he had been ordered
to board in New York, that was traveling west, and that held, by his estimate, between 1,500 and 2,000 men.

“The bunks were stacked high,” Mr. Fouss said. “There was one cooking car on the train, and you ate using your mess kit and your canteen. You would carry that to the cooking car, and they would ladle out your food for you. Beans, and I don't remember what else. Potatoes, and what passed for coffee.”

He laughed and said, “It wasn't very romantic.”

For some of the men, it seemed the trip would never end: “It took five days and five nights to get to California. When we were in Iowa going west, they said that in the next state there was a place where we were going to be allowed off the train, and that we would be given something to eat. We didn't know what to believe—it didn't sound right. We were
never
allowed off the train, so what was this about?”

The men found out soon enough. “All the tables, all the counters, all those wonderful ladies,” Mr. Fouss said. “Anything we wanted to eat…I never, in all these years since, have figured out why they were the ones to do this. In the whole country, why them?

“The first thing you saw in North Platte was that it was very
orderly.
Just a very nice feeling, the way everything was set up. And it
smelled
so good in that town. The bread…well, Nebraska is in the middle of the United States, so I
guess it shouldn't be surprising that they have the right crops to make bread that smells good, and it did. We didn't get off the train again until we arrived in California.

“Maybe being in the Middle West was a big part of why it could happen there. The people in the Middle West are a different breed of cat. They don't live with their heads in the clouds. They are willing to think things are OK. They'll give you a hand.”

When he came home from the war he set up a radio shop, doing both sales and service. Then television came along, and he worked putting electrical wiring into houses. The world was changing, and he knew it—more and more, people stayed home and let the world be delivered to them on a glass screen instead of venturing out quite as much to try to see that world with their own eyes.

And when they did venture beyond the borders of their towns, as often as not it was high in the air. “When you're flying, you don't see much,” he said. “When you traveled by train, you could see the little towns—you could see America.”

That's how he saw North Platte—and even though it was only for a few minutes, he has never forgotten.

He has no souvenirs from his brief time in North Platte, no photographs, but that doesn't matter. “I still see the town,” he said. “What I see, when I think back on it, is a lot of happy people.”

He never would have met them if the troops had been
transported by airplanes. And after the war, that's the way just about everyone in the United States began to travel.

“The railroads decided they could make more money hauling a hog than carrying a person,” Mr. Fouss said. “The railroads did it to themselves.”

 

At the Bailey Yard, Deloyt Young steered his car past rusty tanks and around outbuildings with grit and streaked dirt on their windows, his wheels bouncing over ten sets of tracks until we arrived at an enormous shed inside of which Union Pacific mechanics repair and service more than ten thousand locomotives a month. He led me inside, and once we were there he had to shout to be heard over the work being carried out by hard-hat crews on every side of us.

“These guys can work on eighty-seven locomotives at a time,” he said, leaning close to my ear. “It never stops—three shifts every day. The railroad keeps a hundred rooms at a motel a few miles from here—they're turned over two or three times a day from crews coming in, getting some rest while their trains are being serviced here, then leaving town while other trains and other crews come in.”

The yellow locomotives with the red, white and blue Union Pacific logos painted on them dominated our sight line, but Young motioned to locomotives and freight cars owned by other railroads, too, all being worked on here. Men were climbing over and under and around the cars,
and if the men needed to be reminded of the dangers of being too casual around these huge machines, there was a toteboard keeping track of how well the employees were meeting their safety goals during a given period of time. Things appeared to be going relatively well: 0
COLLISIONS.
0
AMPUTATIONS.
0
FATALITIES
.

Young pointed out to me, beyond the repair shed, some different kinds of trains rolling in and rolling out: “That's a double-stack train leaving town, heading east. That one next to it is a soda-ash train. And you can see that coal train on the next track.”

He said that Americans don't think much about freight trains, even though much of the merchandise and goods they couldn't live without is delivered to them over the rails. “I don't know,” he said. “People felt they were a part of the passenger trains. They don't feel a part of freight, and I doubt that they really think about how everything they need gets to them.”

Off in the distance—it didn't seem to be emanating from inside the Bailey Yard, but the place was so large that you really couldn't tell—came the sound of a train whistle.

“Two longs, a short, and a long,” Young said. “He's getting ready to go through a crossing.”

 

“To understand what the passenger trains meant to North Platte, you have to be from there,” said Fran Hahler
Wohlpart, sixty-five, who was born in North Platte and who now lives in Las Vegas.

Right before World War II, she said, “people made their own entertainment. On Saturday nights, you'd have supper, get in the car, and go downtown. Your dad would get a good parking space, and you would watch the people go shopping—including a lot of the farmers who would always come to town to shop on Saturday nights.

“You just sat there in the car and said, ‘Oh, there's Louie—he looks well this week. He's got his whole family with him.'

“The passenger train station was the center of downtown. I'd be sitting listening to my mom and dad talking, with my brother and my two sisters in the car with us—my father was the General Motors dealer in North Platte. Hahler Buick—he sold Buicks, Cadillacs, Olds, Pontiacs….

“And we would sit in his car and watch the people. This was before television, so that was the only way to see something—to be there. You would watch the people walk from store to store—O'Connor's Department Store, Rhoads Dress Shop, Montgomery Ward…this is what a lot of families did on Saturday nights.”

Once the war started and the troop trains began rolling through, the scene at the railroad station downtown became electrifying, Mrs. Wohlpart said. “The thousands of uniforms pouring out of the trains—Army, Navy, I was too young to always know what each uniform meant, but
I knew they were all on our side. The thing I remember—and this is not what you might expect—is that most of the time
they all seemed in such good humor.
It's as if they were eager to get where they were going, that they were looking forward to what their country had asked them to do.

“The Canteen at the train station was so crowded, all the time. I didn't have any business in there, but I loved watching from the outside. The trains were always coming in and going out—there was never a quiet hour. If coming downtown to watch people used to be a Saturday night thing, once the Canteen opened it was an every night thing. My parents would see a soldier and say to us children, ‘He's a nice-looking guy, isn't he? I think he'll really do well for himself in the Army.'

“Looking at all the soldiers at the train station inspired us. My mother rolled bandages, to be used on the battlefields. My aunts knitted sweaters, vests, scarves, socks and mittens. How did it get to the soldiers? How did anything get to the soldiers—you turned it over to the government, and they got it to the soldiers.”

And those nights at the depot, just watching the locomotives come in and out of town, with America's sons on board…

“You would be surprised how many people did it,” Mrs. Wohlpart said. “I was there hundreds of times. I'd go in the afternoons with my mom. There was a constant stream of soldiers getting on and off the trains.

“Mom always wore her corset and her stockings and her shoes with a medium heel, and a dress, of course, because this is the way ladies dressed. And always a hat—you didn't leave the house without a hat. In the summertime straw, in the wintertime felt.”

I asked her if, had television been a part of America's life during the 1930s and 1940s, she thought the people still would have come downtown—not only during the Canteen years, but during the years before and immediately after the war, when families came to the train station and the stores to watch everyone out on the town.

“No,” she said. “People wouldn't have come downtown if they had television sets, because there would be something to watch at home. TV's more convenient. You don't have to do anything.”

There was no shortage of things to do in the Canteen years: “Even as a kid, I remember having very busy days during the war. We had paper drives, rubber drives, scrap metal drives—my sister and I would take a little red wagon around, and once on a scrap metal drive we hit the jackpot. Someone gave us a water heater. I was only six, and my sister was four years older. You'd just knock on the door. ‘Hi, we're on a scrap metal drive.' They'd give you cans, or a pot. And then one day there was this water heater.