Update: Destroyed shortly after these photographs were taken. I went by the old roundhouse on Clayton Avenue and realized the area had been completely transformed. When I first went by almost a decade ago, the site had been choked with trees and thick underbrush. It grew even thicker in the intervening years, and I didn’t…
Tag: Roundhouses
B&O Railroad Roundhouse, Cone Yard, Revisited
Oops! It turns out the old roundhouse in East St. Louis was demolished sometime in the last decade, and all that is left are the concrete foundations, and the rapidly filling pits where the locomotives once drove in to be serviced. The roundtable had already been filled in completely years ago. It turns out this…
Hannibal and the River and Railroads
North Main Street is a National Register District, and the buildings house a bunch of businesses that cater to the tourist crowd that comes from around the world to see the hometown of Mark Twain. The houses are humble right by the water, as well, as you’d expect for the wharf stevedores (does anyone use…
Oelwein, Iowa
Update: New historic photo and Sanborn maps added in July of 2021 along with new commentary about the town. I also went back and revisited the old railroad machine shops, which can be seen towards the end of this post in July of 2021. Oelwein still bustles because of a heavy railroad presence, and its…
Railcar Repair Dome, East Alton
Someone out there must know what the story is behind this awesome geodesic dome. It fixes railcars, and that is all we could find out.
Roundhouse, Hall Street
I went and visited the roundhouse on North Hall Street; there is very little left, but there is clear evidence of such a structure existing up this way.
Roundhouse Remnants, Clayton Avenue
Update: I went back and revisited the remains of the roundhouse in the winter of 2021 and discovered that the thick underbrush which had obscured the site in in January of 2012 had been cleared. It was demolished shortly after the second visit. Finally, after weeks of waiting for the weather to break, I made…
Missouri Pacific Roundhouses in Between Compton and Cardinal North of Chouteau
I also determined that there was a large brick roundhouse right in the middle of the Mill Creek Valley just east of Compton Ave. The two Sanborn maps show the whole complex; for a sense of place, the little wood roundhouse is the same structure in both maps. No traces of the roundhouses remain, and…
Roundhouse, Chouteau and Vandeventer
All throughout St. Louis locomotives needed somewhere to park, and the roundhouse, a type of structure almost entirely vanished from the region (except in East St. Louis, which you can see here and here) provided the much-needed space to store multiple locomotives in a small space. This one, located at the end of the railyards…
East St. Louis Roundhouse, Part 2
Update: The roundhouse was demolished at some point after these photos were taken but before January of 2020. I tend to think of ruins as static beings, immutable and staying the same for decades. This obviously is far from the truth; abandoned buildings are in a constant state of kinetic change, as a recent visit…