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A classification yard (American English, as well as the Canadian National Railway), marshalling yard (British English, Hong Kong, Indian English, and Australian English, and the former Canadian Pacific Railway) or shunting yard (Central Europe) is a Rail yard used to accumulate on one of several tracks. First, a group of cars is taken to a track, sometimes called a lead or a drill. From there, the cars are sent through a series of Railway switch called a ladder onto the classification tracks. Some larger yards may put the lead on an artificially built hill called a hump to use the force of gravity to propel the cars through the ladder.
Freight trains that consist of unrelated cars must be made into a train grouped according to their destinations; this shunting is done at the starting point. Some trains drop and pick up cars along their route in classification yards or at industrial sidings. In contrast is a unit train that carries, for example, from the Factory to a port, or coal from a Mining to the Power station.
Most gravity yards were built in Germany (especially in the kingdom of Saxony) and Great Britain (such as Edgehill, 1873), a few also in some other European countries, for example Łazy yard near Zawiercie on the Warsaw–Vienna Railway (in Poland). In the US, there were very few old gravity yards; one of the few gravity yards in operation today is CSX's Readville Yard south of Boston, Massachusetts.
The speed of the cars rolling down from the hump into the classification bowl must be regulated according to whether they are full or empty, heavy or light freight, varying number of axles, whether there are few or many cars on the classification tracks, and varying weather conditions, including temperature, wind speed, and direction. In regard to speed regulation, there are two types of hump yards—with or without mechanization by retarders. In the old non-retarder yards, braking was usually done in Europe by railroaders who laid skates onto the tracks. The skate or wheel chock was manually (or, in rare cases, mechanically) placed on one or both of the rails so that the treadles or rims of the wheel or wheels caused frictional retardation and resulted in the halting of the railway car. In the United States, riders in cars did this braking. In modern retarder yards, this work is done by mechanized "rail brakes," called retarders, which brake cars by gripping their wheels. They are operated either Pneumatics or Hydraulics. Pneumatic systems are prevalent in the United States, France, Belgium, Russia and China, while hydraulic systems are used in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands.
Classification bowls in Europe typically consist of 20 to 40 tracks, divided into several fans or balloons of tracks, usually with eight classification tracks following a retarder in each one, often 32 tracks altogether. In the United States, many classification bowls have more than 40 tracks, frequently divided into six to ten classification tracks in each balloon loop.
Bailey Yard in North Platte, Nebraska, United States, the world's largest classification yard, is a hump yard. Other large American hump yards include Argentine Yard in Kansas City, Kansas, Robert Young Yard in Elkhart, Indiana, Clearing Yard in Chicago, Illinois, Englewood Yard in Houston, Texas, and Waycross Rice Yard in Waycross, Georgia. Notably, in Europe, Russia, and China, all major classification yards are hump yards. Europe's largest hump yard is that of Maschen near Hamburg, Germany; it is only slightly smaller than Bailey Yard. The second largest is in the port of Antwerp, Belgium. Most hump yards are single yards with one classification bowl, but some, mostly very large, hump yards have two of them, one for each direction, and thus are double yards, such as the Maschen, Antwerp, Clearing, and Bailey yards.
Almost all gravity yards have been retrofitted with humps and are worked as hump yards. Examples include Chemnitz Hilbersdorf (today Saxon Railway Museum), Dresden Friedrichstadt and Nürnberg (Nuremberg) Rbf (Rbf: Rangierbahnhof, "classification yard"), in Germany.
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