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I've learned a few things listening to the West Hump dispatcher at BNSF's Northtown Yard in Minneapolis. I hear trains being communicated-with that are Superior- Galesburg, Tacoma-Chicago, LaCrosse-Pasco, Northtown-Wilmar, etc., etc. Near as I can tell, sometimes a train is a through-freight that stops there to make a crew change and will have its locomotives refuelled either by a fuel truck to do it faster or they have to cut them off and send them to the "house" to be fuelled. Sometimes they change-out the power or add or replace locomotives in a consist. I've heard through-freights being ordered to set-out a cut of cars on the head-end of their train, so they do perform some switching in the yard on the way to their ultimate destinations. If you can get a Bearcat scanner and tune it to the yard operations channels, you'll learn a lot. I can't often hear the train crews in the yard talking to the hump dispatcher because my house is over 25 miles away from the yard, but I can hear the dispatcher real clear and yet I have begun to understand a few things over time. It'll all sound kinda complicated but over time you can sort-out some of the basics of how things occur (that's why I want a yard layout of Northtown!).
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