Tavern League of Railfans points a camera east across Union Pacific's Butler Yard from the Wash Station car wash at 4770 N 124th Street in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, at milepost 95.3 of the UP Milwaukee Subdivision. Seven named tracks fan out in front of the lens, and the stream carries a scanner feed covering four subdivisions.

About this cam

Tavern League of Railfans operates this camera from the Wash Station car wash on the southeast corner of 124th Street and Hampton Avenue in Wauwatosa, on the edge of Union Pacific's Butler Yard. The operator gives the exact spot: 4770 N 124th St, milepost 95.3 of the UP Milwaukee Subdivision. The same address is burned into the video overlay, so it can be read straight off the picture. The camera faces east, and the operator explains the geography rather than leaving it to guesswork: trains moving left to right are southbound, heading towards St Francis and on to Proviso Yard and greater Chicago; trains moving right to left are northbound, heading for BJ South (CP N096) and on to Adams, Wisconsin to the west or Sheboygan to the east. Track by track from nearest to furthest, the operator names them: UP Milwaukee Sub Main 1, Milwaukee Sub Main 2, the Hampton crossover from Main 2 to Long 1, yard lead Long 1 (tracks 1 to 10), yard lead Long 2 (tracks 11 to 20), the North Grain Yard Lead (tracks 21 to 29), and Track 30. The gap between Long 2 and the North Grain Yard Lead is where the old yard office once stood.

What to watch for

Union Pacific yard work is the whole show here — this is a working classification yard, not a passing main line, so expect switching moves, cuts of grain cars, and locomotives idling on the leads as well as through freights on Mains 1 and 2. The operator mixes a scanner into the stream covering 160.485 (AAR 025) for the Milwaukee and Shoreline Subs, 160.890 (AAR 052) for the Adams Sub, 161.040 (AAR 062) for the Kenosha Sub and 161.175 (AAR 071) for Butler Yard itself; the detector on the Shoreline Sub at milepost 100.2 is regularly heard. Watching the Hampton crossover tells you when a train is being moved between the main line and the yard leads.