Okay bear with me, and please speak up if you know where to find the article I am searching for…
A few years ago, in an issue of MR there were several articles on steam… including one on a very simple and rustic facility with a roundhouse but not turntable where turnouts deployed the tracks to the stalls and it was a simple and well laid out little yard with either a wye or a reverse loop to turn locos, it wasn’t a feature, but on e of the department articles-mostly sketched if I remember correctly… I would very much like to have a copy of the article…If anyone knows where to find it please.
Not familiar with the article, but I do know of one such engine house: with turnouts (the wye was 1/2 mile away) It is (was?) a 4 track 80’x120’ big boxcar red barn at Beiber, CA at the GN-WP interchange yard, (now BNSF) on the highline between Keddie, CA and Klamath Falls, OR. John
To see a three-stall fan-shaped engine house with no turntable, mapsearch Rapid City, SD, then follow the tracks eastward along Main Street to the area where they start to curve to the southeast.
Back in the early 80s the CNW kept a wedge plow there.
In Japan, the usual practice was to have a rectangular engine house where steam, diesel and electric locos were serviced indiscriminately on parallel tracks. The turntable was some distance away, with just a couple of approach tracks separated by a coaling platform (Literally, a platform with coal piled on it, to be hand-shoveled into steam engine tenders!) Water was supplied through standpipes at the ends of that platform.