No Humping Allowed! (Unusual #003) Traditional Cache

When I first discovered a picture on the side of a train car like what you see above, I just had to figure out what on earth the sign was talking about.

Turns out “humping” is something done at a train classification yard.  A classification yard makes trains by routing or sorting individual cars to different tracks depending on where the car needs to go and onto which train.   The largest and most active yards are called Hump yards, because they have a large “hump” or hill over which the cars are pushed by the engine. Single cars, or some coupled cars in a block, are uncoupled just before or at the crest of the hump and roll by gravity into their destination tracks in the classification bowl (the tracks where the cars are sorted).  The Englewood rail yard is one of the largest Hump yards in the United States and may sort thousands of cars in a day.  Some rail cars with fragile or particularly toxic chemicals cars are marked “Do Not Hump” meaning they should not be put together using this method of putting a train together.  Those cars are individually put onto the train more carefully.

As you approach the cache from the south you will see the Englewood hump and you will probably get to see some humping.  Keep in mind that there is one hump track which then splits into three tracks, and then those split multiple times until there are a total of 64 individual tracks inside the rail yard.