Belen BNSF Rail Yard - New Mexico, USA

This Virtual Railfan camera is mounted at the historic Harvey House Museum in Belen, overlooking BNSF's Belen Yard on the Southern Transcon, the busiest freight corridor in North America running between Chicago and Los Angeles. Belen is a critical junction where four subdivisions meet: the El Paso Subdivision from the south, the Clovis Subdivision to the east, the Glorieta Subdivision, and the Gallup Subdivision, making it one of the most operationally significant yards in BNSF's south-western network.

The Southern Transcon carries more intermodal container movements than any other rail corridor in the United States, and the yard activity visible in this feed reflects that volume, with westbound trains frequently running distributed power units positioned mid-train or at the rear rather than only at the front. Carmen, the railway inspectors who walk the length of trains checking mechanical condition, are regularly visible on ATVs moving along the yard tracks. There is no Amtrak service at Belen as the Southwest Chief bypasses the town to the north via the Glorieta Pass route.

The Harvey House Museum, from which this camera operates, is one of the surviving examples of the Fred Harvey Company's chain of railway hotels and restaurants that operated along the AT&SF mainline from the 1870s, credited with bringing the first standardised food service to long-distance rail travel in the American West. Belen sits in Valencia County on the Rio Grande, 35 miles south of Albuquerque, and the camera has been streaming continuously since 31 August 2018.

Did You Know? The Fred Harvey Company, whose museum hosts this camera, employed the first large-scale female workforce in the American West, with "Harvey Girls" staffing its railway restaurants across the Southwest from the 1880s onwards.

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