3 Valley Gap Railway Museum and Roundhouse
Click here to visit the official website of the 3 Valley Gap Railway Round House
Visit the Railway Roundhouse - home to an impressive variety of railway displays. Guided tours are conducted daily through the Heritage Ghost Town, Antique Auto
Museum, and Railway Roundhouse.
One of the newest and most ambitious construction projects at 3 Valley Gap is our Covered Turntable and Roundhouse. A roundhouse is the building where the day-to-day maintenance of steam locomotives would take place. This included regular greasing and oiling, cleaning of the alkali from the boiler tubes, and cleaning of the flues. Naturally, the locomotives would be very large and difficult to move around, and the amount of equipment required to maintain them was tremendous. As well, unlike the modern diesel locomotives of today, a steam locomotive was designed to go forward, and seldom backed up. To solve this, a turntable mechanism was utilized to rotate the locomotives to various specialized workshops in the roundhouse.
Most of the steam locomotives were designed for specific services - freight or passenger, mountain or prairie, and as such, steam locomotives seldom ventured more than a few divisional points from home. Thus there was usually a turntable and roundhouse built approximately every one hundred miles (to a maximum of two hundred miles).
The number of stalls in a roundhouse varied from as little as two up to about sixty or so. This depended on the location of the divisional point and the number of locomotives working in that portion of the railway.
The Roundhouse and Turntable complex at 3 Valley Gap contains a lobby entrance (a replica of The Arlington Court building from Revelstoke), "Back shop", a "Pattern Shop" and a "Railway Coach Repair and Carpentry Shop." The diameter of the Round House is approximately 300 feet, and the turntable will be fully operational.
This will be the largest covered Turntable and Roundhouse complex in Canada.