Union Pacific's Marysville Subdivision DVD

Old timers would not recognize the way that the Union Pacific Marysville subdivision looks today.  This line stretches from Topeka, sixty-eight miles west of Kansas City, to Gibbon, Nebraska where the triple track main to North Platte begins.  UP’s Kansas City main today is two main tracks on wide centers with centralized traffic control as compared to the single track CTC line with 110 car sidings as late as the early 1970s.  With little straight track until its gets close to Gibbon, most of this line is quite different from UP’s Omaha main with its long tangents up the North Platte Valley.  The St. Joseph and Grand Island which UP had a difficult time maintaining control of due in part to the restrictions in their charter against building branch lines, is a busy main line today with at least half of the trains being coal trains to and from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming.  During the previous decade almost as many trains would head southeast at Gibbon onto the Marysville sub towards Kansas City than proceeded straight on the main line to Omaha.  But these are not normal times and the coal traffic is way off with the low price of natural gas and bloated utility stockpiles due to a warm winter.  This program shows over twenty-four hours of fast paced action on UP’s still busy Marysville Subdivision both sides of Fairbury, Nebraska in April of 2016. Union Pacific's Marysville Subdivision is 77 minutes in length and it can be watched with or without narration.