This page was created by Nathanael Chambers. 

Carleton Place Heritage Project

Why a Roundhouse?

              Roundhouses serve two main purposes. First, when it comes to steam locomotives, they are extremely unpredictable and require numerous moving parts to operate. [1] They easily become a liability when not serviced as often as daily, therefore the costs of running a steam locomotive includes a servicing team and paying for a layover location to do the work. For this reason, Canadian Pacific and Canadian National, in the late 1800s and the early 1900s, were the largest employers across the nation. Canadian Pacific needed to maintain the rail lines in addition to their fleet of locomotives. It required manpower with upwards of 9000 employees at their peak. [2] Working on the locomotives themselves required a furnace, machining parts, a wrought and cast iron supply on site, charcoal or any other burner source, a supply of smaller mechanical parts, and engineers to approve of the repairs and testing. This short video shows some of the work these engines needed. What is interesting about this video is the detail in repairing the reusable parts and reforging used parts. The service is extensive and requires the replacement of all damaged parts and the replacement of worn parts. [3] Getting below each locomotive is also important and having that workspace be comfortable is important.
 
              The second main purpose is changing the orientation of the engine on the main rail line. Steam engines are not engineered to push cargo in front of the engine, but pull only. So to proceed in the opposite direction, the engine would need to flip directions. To combat this problem, servicing centers need structures known as turntables to rotate the orientation of an engine on the line.
              Roundhouses during the the early twentieth century were common and vary in size in railyards spread across the country. The turntables used varied in soze based on the style of locomotive used by that specific company. [4] Capreol Ontario has a roundhouse with more capacity than Carleton Place’s. John Street Roundhouse in Toronto still stands as a museum for artifacts related to the railway industry and still hold some iconic steam and diesel locomotives. Hanna Roundhouse in Alberta is another surviving roundhouse that is no longer used and remains standing albeit falling apart. Like mentioned earlier, the townspeople play a role in the acceptability of industries that affect the town. This can be a sign of a town that has a long history on industry potential and roundhouses are one of the signifiers of a prosperous town/county. Roundhouses represented cultural purpose to connecting surrounding towns together with either industrial products or people making them important to the locals and the city. 


  
  
  
              Looking into the materials of the Carleton Place Roundhouse, you find that the exterior wall is a load bearing foundational wall. The materials used are primarily limestone and timber, these are common building materials for city funded service buildings in the late 1800s like the current clocktower and town hall. The date of completion is difficult to pinpoint as not many records exist of the plans or have an architect, engineer, or date. An adapted planfrom Canadian Pacific Railway (supplied by Omer Lavalée in 1980) shows the planning specifications of this monument and shows the details of the service sections within each locomotive garage. [5] Even with the humble beginnings, this location at Carleton place had grown into the main operations center in the following years leading to the expansion of the line’s connections creating more jobs and becoming an accessible travel hub for commuters, and tourists. 

 
              Realistically, not all technologies remain the forefront of humanity, as the shift to diesel locomotives grew and changing market conditions developed, this particular roundhouse was not as useful. Diesel engines were more profitable as steam engines severely outweighed diesel service costs. [6] Then in the early 1900s a little after the Great War, the usage of steam engines began decreasing. This repair shop faded in prominence and with not as many workers present at a time it was decommissioned as a shop as Canadian Pacific moved it's operations from Carleton Junction (Header Image). Holding onto that heritage is especially important as the changes in society place the development of great industries in the background.
              Carleton Place’s roundhouse is a presentation of a railroad history that shows just how influential it was across the nation. It not being the only piece of heritage in this old town shows that the historical significance reaches beyond just the local surroundings It carries weight in an industrial context. Besides the conditions of current rail travel, the existence of monuments like roundhouses that highlight the steam age of rail travel are memorable. The scale of the effects of this industry, as large as it is, was also using Carleton Place as an important location with this roundhouse being proof. The people of Carleton place were also builders of the larger town seen today as jobs brought here boosted the local economy.



[1] Gibbs, Ken. The Steam Locomotive: An Engineering History. Amberley Publishing Limited, 2012.
[2] Mackinnon, Mary. "Trade unions and employment stability at the Canadian Pacific Railway, 1903-29." See Mitch et al (2004): 2-3. 
[3] Gibbs. The Steam Locomotive. 2012
[4] Yeaton, Fred Drinkwater. "Locomotive turntables." (1914).
[5] Lavalée, Omer. Scan_20210210.pdf. Microsoft Teams. (1980).
[6] Lamb, J. Parker. Evolution of the American diesel locomotive. Indiana University Press, 2007.


 

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