Golden Spike Tower and Bailey Yard

North Platte has been a railroad town from its first plat. Grenville Dodge, the Union Pacific's chief engineer, is tied to the town's founding, the first train arrived in 1866, and the company put shops and winter quarters for its crews here. The yard that grew from them is named for Edd H. Bailey, a former Union Pacific president. It covers about 2,850 acres over eight miles of the valley, and Union Pacific calls it the largest railroad classification yard in the world; Guinness World Records recognized it as the largest rail yard in 1995. Freight cars are sorted over two humps, an eastbound one 34 feet high and a westbound one of 20 feet, and the service tracks handle thousands of locomotives a month.

The Golden Spike Tower opened beside the yard on June 26, 2008. Union Pacific's old viewing platform was falling apart in the mid-1990s, and local leaders wanted something better; a private nonprofit runs the tower. An elevator climbs to an open-air deck on the seventh floor and an enclosed eighth floor with a view all the way around, where volunteers, many of them retired from the yard, explain what is moving below.

The town's other railroad story has no building left. From Christmas Day 1941 to April 1, 1946, volunteers from North Platte and 125 other communities met every troop train during its ten-minute stop and served an estimated six million service members. The depot was torn down in 1973, and the tower's exhibits cover the North Platte Canteen.