Crawford Roundhouse Demolition

View Comments

• Well I don't know the person who did this, but I did hear about it a few times.

  As for Heavy Repairs, for CN & CP, they are done in a few locations.
  For CN
  Woodcrest Shops in Homewood, IL is the main shop for CN
  Mac Millan Yard in Toronto (Concord), does some major and minor repair
  Montreal has small shops
  Walkers Yard in Edmonton,
  Transcona in Winnipeg.
  As for Car shops, there is one in all of the towns listed, plus small shops all around.

  For CP,
  Agincourt Yard in Toronto has a minor repair shop
  St Luc Shops in Montreal does most GE Repairs
  Weston Shops in Winnipeg does Mostly EMD Repairs
  Ogden in Calgary does repairs on all units & Repaints
  Port Coquitlam Yard in near Vancouver, does mostly GE Repairs
  St Paul, Mn, does all American Road units (exSoo line) Repairs and a few others.
  As for Car shops, those are few and far between, but most are based in all the major Yards, not in Small yards like Windsor anymore.

• >>Shawn
  >>Are roundhouses no longer needed? Or is there a modern alternative for a roundhouse?

  There sure a use for 'em...the Steamwhistle Brewery in Toronto is in an old roundhouse next to the CN Tower.
  Very "tasty" tour too!!

  Check out the virtual tour http://www.steamwhistle.ca/tour/virtualTour.php

• Last I heard the turntable was still in use, as CP doesn't have a "Y" to turn engines around on.

  Roundhouses are pretty much obsolete, most of them were built for steam engines and thus were never made for the giant diesels of today. It's entirely impractical. And the diesels can go long distances without requiring service like steam engines did.

• DEisels are a heatery breed you can leave them outside running for weeks. An example was the
  New York Central spur in Leamington, the F-7 rummblrd away night and day, across from the high school on Talbot St. east.

• I operated roundhouse turntable 1955 to 1957 during steam engine era.What an exciting part of my life.So sorry to see it in ruines great loss.

• well this isn't what i wanted to see when i logged in! S.O.B.!

  well, thanks Ian and Andrew for the photos. I sure hope they don't scrap that table. If they don't need it SOLRS sure could. I think this was one of the last roundhouses for quite some miles. I'm failry sure Detroit has done away with all of theirs as well.

  As for the ETR, I always wondered if they had a turntable. There's picture in the library website titled "essex terminal roundhouse", and they must have had somewhere to turn the engines as there really arn't alot of wyes availiable to them....or wern't?
  And there are RR co's in the states still using roundhouses for their Diesles, CP usually has some pretty hefty boys sitting in the yard though, so yeah, in this case impractical.

  damn

• Sad to see more railway history erased.

• Andrew - on the roundhouse subject, on one of my 1949 DTE maps i noticed on the old LE&DR, just south of the wyandotte subway, it sure looks like there was a turntable, and what seems to be a water tower in what is now an empty lot behind a mechanic/junkyard at Edna and Montreiul. The wedge shaped office itself looks rather railroadie to me as well. Seems a logical place for Hiram to put the LE&DR home base.
  I was wondering if you knew anything about it?

• Aaron, That's news to me... I've never come across anything about it... I always assumed that they would have been HQ'ed at either the train station in Walkerville or somewhere in the Hiram Walker offices... I don't know anything about that site, maybe someone who's a rail expert can help us out...

• Aaron - I assume this is what you were talking about right?