Building the EBT Roundhouse and Turntable: Introduction

Twelve miles south of Mount Union, Pennsylvania lies the village of Rockhill Furnace, home of the well-preserved shops and service facilities of the East Broad Top narrow gauge railroad.  Across Willow Street from the iconic Orbisonia Station, an eight stall roundhouse houses the six remaining EBT steam engines as well as the M-1 gas electric motor car.  Some version of the roundhouse and its 65 foot steel turntable have stood on this site since 1875.  It is one of the most recognizable structures on the railroad.  This is how the roundhouse appeared in 1930.

A more recent photograph shows the turntable and roll-down doors that still grace the roundhouse.

An aerial view, taken by Lance Myers, gives an overall view of the roundhouse and turntable.  The building on the left with the red roof is the paint shop, where today the Friends of the East Broad Top continue their efforts to repair and preserve EBT rolling stock.  Note the shed on the right side of the roundhouse, erected in the 1930's to house the EBT's short-lived bus and truck fleet.  Behind the roof lies the village of Rockhill.

Over the last several years, I have written about how I built my model railroad, including the fictional town of Blacklog (modeled after Mount Union) with its coal plant, brickyard, and dual gauge yard.  I have written and posted photos describing how I constructed the EBT company town of Robertsdale.   My version of the EBT rumbles south from Blacklog through Rockhill Furnace to Robertsdale and the coal mines on the east slope of Broad Top Mountain.  But to date I have written virtually nothing about Rockhill Furnace and the EBT shop complex there.

It's not that I don't have a number of structures from Rockhill: the car shop, boiler house, foundry, sand house, yard office and storage sheds.  But the anchor for all of these facilities was and is the imposing brick roundhouse and turntable.  And they have proved to be the stumbling block in completing the railroad.

I have been thinking about the roundhouse and turntable for years.  From time to time I played around with various ideas.  I thought of trying to assemble the roundhouse from DPM brick modules, or from various kinds of plastic or paper bricks on styrene walls, and so on.  But nothing gave me the realism I was looking for.  The turntable was even more problematic.  I bought a Model Masterpieces kit for the 65 foot Durango, Colorado, turntable, but wasn't happy with it.  I picked up a Dapol turntable from Britain made of plastic, but it didn't match.  Friends suggested I buy a Walther's N scale 120 foot turntable and modify it to HOn3.  I began to think I would never finish the Rockhill Furnace module on my layout.

The breakthrough came from an unexpected source.  I belong to a narrow gauge Yahoo chat group that is made up of  experienced modelers who, when they're not joking with each other, do some of the finest narrow gauge modeling anywhere.  It was during a discussion of a new product -- laser cut brick walls -- that I mentioned my continuing search for appropriate materials to build the EBT roundhouse.  One of the replies grabbed my attention: Michael Rebeiro, who under the name Stone Mill Models designs and manufactures laser cut model railroad structures, said he could make the roundhouse walls by laser cutting molds and casting the brick walls out of epoxy resin.

There followed a flurry of emails between us, followed by photographs and drawings from my files, along with architectural drawings of the roundhouse and turntable in the Library of Congress (the Historical American Building Survey and Historic American Engineering Record known as HABS/HAER).   After we agreed on a price for the work, Michael input the data into a CAD program on his computer, then used the program to guide a laser that cut the brick work onto special wood panels that would become the molds.

In my next several posts I will explain how we struggled to recreate this unique railroad structure, some of the false starts and problems we encountered, and the final result.  At the same time that I was working with Michael Rebeiro, I also discovered (again, on line) a British company (Kitwood Hill Models) that produces an inexpensive HOn3 kit for the Durango turntable, which just happens to be identical to the one in Rockhill Furnace. The work continues on the roundhouse and turntable, and I invite you to follow along as I construct one of the centerpieces of my model railroad.