Star BB Club CdV

[steve B]

Originally Posted by ramram

I'm perplexed, a roundhouse did not need or have a smoke stack. It absolutely looks like a mining location, with the spoil piles, etc, but that building looks nothing like a roundhouse.

Rob M.

Many buildings at the time had smokestacks, especially if they were outside urban areas.

The smokestack would have been from the steam plant, which provided both heat for the building and power for any powered machinery they had.
Heat for the roundhouse would have taken a lot of steam considering the size of those buildings. You really don't want the boilers of the engines feeezing and getting damaged. Some places also did repairs in the same building and could have used steam powered cranes and other tools.

And being a railroad they probably had a coal fired steam plant. So rather than spoil piles those would be cinder piles for the cinders from the coal plant as well as from the engines.

One of our local land marks was essentially destroyed by lightning late last year. The Hood smokestack was 100 feet tall, and the company made patent medicines.
http://lifefromtheroots.blogspot.com...lowell_22.html

Steve B