Saw some really fun activity down at the yard today.
A very large grouping of UP engines were hooked up to a relatively small number of cars and were moving up and down the rail switching the cars onto various tracks. I've never seen this type of operation before -- the engine group would move forward, then a guy would jump off the back of the train and throw the switch, then the engine group would back up, literally unhook and throw off the back four cars, which would go careening down the track un-attended, and they would slowly stop in EXACTLY the right place, just on their own rolling power pushed off previously by the locos.
:thumb: Forward they would go again, then manually throw the switch, and 6 hopper cars would roll down the rail to a resting place.
These guys worked the rail for about a half hour until all of the cars were gone, then the 5 engines went down the rail to rest. WOW. Many of you must have seen this many times, but this was a first for me!. Really showed me how operations in a yard work -- I never would have thought they would just "throw" those cars off down the rail like that.