Union Pacific Rail - Kearney, Nebraska, USA

Union Pacific freight trains roll through Kearney, Nebraska, on the Overland Route, the line that grew out of the original transcontinental railroad, and this west-facing camera watches them head out across the wide, flat Platte River valley toward the west.

Kearney calls itself the Midway City. Since at least 1890 it has claimed to be exactly 1,733 miles from both Boston and San Francisco, a figure based on an old railroad route rather than a straight line drawn on the map.

Each spring the valley around Kearney hosts one of the world's great wildlife spectacles, when about 500,000 sandhill cranes stop along the Platte River to rest and feed. The migration peaks in March.

Did You Know? Roughly 80 percent of the world's sandhill cranes pass through Nebraska during their spring migration.

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