A moderately slow one from Mookie

[Mookie]

Caught grief on a quickie, so will move a little slower this time.

Why was the roundhouse round?

That's it....

Mookie

[JoeKoh]

a turntable for locomotives turns 360 degrees.thus the shape for the trainshed would be a cirlcle or "round".
stay safe
Joe

[Mookie]

QUOTE: Originally posted by JoeKoh

a turntable for locomotives turns 360 degrees.thus the shape for the trainshed would be a cirlcle or "round".
stay safe
Joe

I thought of that too - but our turntable was outside the roundhouse. Now what?

Mook

[JoeKoh]

Ok classtime
mookie take an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper and a pen out on your desk.thepaper needs to be length(11)wise from left to right now the pen is your big boy locomotive. now pretend its on a turtable outside the shed(paper)now how many bigboys can you fit in a rectangle shed(remember to leave a little extra room )big engines.I can fit about five without breaking the walls of the shed. Now draw a half circle on the paper.now how many bigboys can you fit in the shed?now you can fit eight in the shed thus the reason why the round houses are round.class dissmissed.
stay safe
Joe

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Mookie

"but our turntable was outside the roundhouse."

What are you saying - where exactly was your turntable in relation to the roundhouse? Could it be that the roundhouse was no longer being used and the turntable serving it was removed and its pit filled in and levelled with the ground (yes, such horrors do happen!) and the other turntable served just for turning equipment? Or are you referring to the turntable for playing vinyl music records? Ya never know with da Mook.
It's 3:05 p.m. here in Zagreb, Cro. right now, and I'm finishing with my work for today. Ah'll be bahk on the forum when most of you're sleeping...
Have fun,
Oliver

[CShaveRR]

Hey, Sis!

The one roundhouse I'm familiar with (Pere Marquette's in Wyoming Yard; Grand Rapids, Michigan) had 42 stalls. It was almost a complete circle. Consider how big a rectangular building would have had to be to house 42 tracks parallel to each other, or how many switches would be involved to get the engines from one (or two) leads to a specific stall. The radial design and use of a turntable would be your best use of space. (Not to mention how little real estate a turntable would use, as opposed to a wye, for turning a locomotive.)

Steam locomotives were more maintenance-intensive than diesels, so they required a bit more time under a roof. Diesels would lend themselves more to an "in one end, out the other" type of maintenance, which is why you don't see new roundhouses being built. The need for turning locomotives also diminished with the use of diesels.

A perhaps-interesting sidelight. The C&O roundhouse in Hinton, West Virginia, was expanded on at least two occasions...not in the number of stalls, but in the length of the stalls, to accommodate larger locomotives. One of the outside walls showed three distinct sets of brickwork, so the additions to the length (and height) were easy to see.

Carl

[BR60103]

The roundhouse would give equal length to all the tracks. The tracks would be spread out and steam lcocos would be sent in head first so the front end with the mechanism would have a lot more room to work than the tender.
I just saw a plan of the Dairycoates loco facilities in England. The English did things like completely enclosing the turntable in a big square building. There would be varying lengths of tracks for varying lengths of locos. Dairycoates had 5 such buildings in a row and a sixth on one corner. The 5 turntables were in a row, but each shed had outside access tracks as well.
Most English engine sheds were straight (like diesel shops) and the turntables were used for turning locos around rather than accessing the tracks, in fact the turntable would usually be on a separate spur.

[Mookie]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Oliver Trzok

QUOTE: Originally posted by Mookie

"but our turntable was outside the roundhouse."

What are you saying - where exactly was your turntable in relation to the roundhouse? Could it be that the roundhouse was no longer being used and the turntable serving it was removed and its pit filled in and levelled with the ground (yes, such horrors do happen!) and the other turntable served just for turning equipment? Or are you referring to the turntable for playing vinyl music records? Ya never know with da Mook.
It's 3:05 p.m. here in Zagreb, Cro. right now, and I'm finishing with my work for today. Ah'll be bahk on the forum when most of you're sleeping...
Have fun,
Oliver

Oliver - the turntable was right outside the roundhouse and since I was pretty young, I didn't pay attention to the exact location. My thinking is that it was so the engines could be turned and also turned to go into the roundhouse. Most of my yard time was spent in a '38 Buick waiting for my Dad to go to the call office for whatever.

But you bring up another question - can you give out what line of work you are in, in Croatia? Mookie has to go get out her maps again - just got Canada straightened out in her mind, now gotta move again! Still looking for Wyoming, too!

MLM

[mudchicken]

Roundhouses kept all the work in a concentrated area and also allowed mechanical people to turn the engines without involving another craft (union rules can create wierdisms). There are a few covered roundhouses in the US (DSP & P's Alpine Tunnel comes to mind, but those places all needed to be well ventilated). Most roundhouses seemed to have different length tracks and different radii ....Roundhouses fell out of favor mostly because diesel units MU'ed together tend to stay that way, so you want to turn the WHOLE cut of engines around together on a wye or loop track (where you have room, minimum fuss, reconnecting MU cables and getting everything to work is a giant pain)....BNSF retired their turntable in favor of a wye at Alliance, NE not to long ago (The turntable was about to fail anyway and they wanted to turn more than one engine at a time)...Same thing happened at La Junta, Co which went from turntable to wye (1966) to loop track by 1985.

Fascinating to me were transfer tables, saw fewer of them than turntables and only at big shop complexes.

Fe Feathers

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Mookie

"But you bring up another question - can you give out what line of work you are in, in Croatia? Mookie has to go get out her maps again"

Hi, Madame La M.
Sorry about the delay, I've been too busy these days to visit the forum. I work in the customer service department in a wholesale company that's importing and distributing consumer goods in Croatia. I went to college, studied English and French for years and years... but never finished. I am also a railfan and railroad modeler (or rather a Trains and Model Railroader magazine reader and collector of model trains nowadays - I used to go trainwatching much more when I was younger).
The maps can be real fun, I love them. You find some curious things on maps.

And about the roundhouses again - they don't have to be round, they can be a semicircle or even less, so maybe that's why it seemed to you that your turntable was "outside the roundhouse."

Anyway, nice talking to you.

Take care everybody, and remember to take care about the possums, too.

Oliver