Here’s a question that I hope will spark some interesting information and reponses-
I love turntables and roundhouse as much as street running and I know turntables and roundhouses used to be as common as the caboose and the interlocking tower. But like the caboose and the interlocking tower, most have secumbed to history. I know some still operate around the country, usually at large class 1 facilities like Seattle, but I’d be interested in finding out about any small turntables that may still operate in little out of the way places
I remember that Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, WA had a small turntable (no roundhouse) that is still there, though I don’t know of they still use it. Does anyone know if they still use it to turn locomotives?
How many of the smaller turntables still perform their task for regionals, shortlines and class 1’s and where are they located- if they still exist? How many have roundhouses to go with the turntables?
Are there still companies that support the construction and repair of turntables or are they all ‘in-house’ operations. I read that the construction of a turntable was a major and expensive engineering effort.
How many of the larger class 1 turntables and roundhouses still exist and where? This may be a good subject for a trains and classic trains article.
Doing a Forum Search on turntables should generate a number of previous threads dealing with this topic.
I know we lost the BNSF turntable at Eola over the past year, but our turntable at Proviso is doing just fine for now (the roundhouse was long ago removed, after being converted for use by the local garbage disposal company).
The WSOR still uses the ex-WICT/ex-MILW roundhouse in Janesville, WI, and there’s a turntable there in operation.
The DME’s Huron, SD roundhouse has one operating as well (I know because I rode on it during C&NW Hist. Society meet a few years ago). The roundhouse is still used unless CP closed it since.
The BNSF has a turntable at the north end of Northtown Yard, just north of the 44th St. overpass (no roundhouse there, but I believe they still use it for turning locomotives).
I’ve been helping to put together a national (international) inventory of roundhouses and turntables. We’ve got an awful lot of them but there are so many more that we haven’t seen, heard about, gotten to yet. Here’s the current list with pictures. Lots of time is spent following train tracks in Google Earth. If you know of any we missed, and we know there are alot of them, let us know.
Over the past two years, I had been extensively researching all existing roundhouse/turntable/ruins/footprint locations (just in the U.S.) My list was over 1400, including satellite photos of all of them. Recently, when plugging another computer into the same power strip, the computer holding this information was wiped out. All of that work… gone. Terribly heartbreaking, and it happened right before uploading the information onto my website.
The one good thing was about half of the list was saved, when the information I had compiled up to Sept. 2007 was emailed to someone else who recently found the list in his cache and sent it back to me two days ago. Thus, the work will resume, but it will take awhile to get it back to where it once was. A good portion of these were found through obscure references in literature, then locating them through satellite imagery. Many of them are not visible with Google Earth, and required other mapping services to find them.
My lesson is to back everything up, because at any time it’s possible to lose everything. Once it’s completed again, I’ll present the information to this forum. But be patient. This will take awhile, as the hardest ones to find and locate have to be done all over again from scratch. My goal is to complete this list by 2010, barring any other setbacks.
There was one in use in Marshalltown, IA on the UP. It has been a couple years since I’ve been back to that section of yard, but have watched a turn since 2005. Marshalltown is the head end of a long branch to a Cargill plant, so I wouldn’t believe backward running power would be allowed and require the table.
I haven’t been there in about 2 years but the Lewistown, PA yard (what’s left of it) on the former PRR main line had a small operating turntable at the west end of the yard.
We’ve got the Marshalltown, Ia turntable on our page that I linked above. Several other in Iowa as well. I have on the ground photos of the one in Boone (there used to be 2 there) and I even have one in Des Moines with me standing on the turntable as a little kid sometime around 1980. You can still make out where it used to be. Des Moines had at least 3 at one point.
I have the Houston Milby one as well. Also have the old SP shop and the old Katy turntable locations shown. We’ve got an awful lot of them with so many more that haven’t been loaded yet.
Even the Boeing factory in Washington has a turntable!
That Boeing turntable was originally built by GN. On my master list, I had a satellite photo of where the turntable was located originally as well. Here it is today:
CP hasn’t shut anything down in Huron, including the roundhouse. If the PRB coal project gets built, a brand new 5 mile long, quarter mile wide, 28 track yard will be built west of town. I assume that would put an end to the roundhouse. Huron would also be the crew change point for the coal trains. This would add hundreds of jobs to a town of 12,000. Needless to say, there is no vocal opposition to the project.