Turntable

A hostler drove a locomotive onto the turntable, and an operator rotated it from a control box until it aligned with the desired track into the roundhouse, after which the hostler drove the locomotive into the proper bay for maintenance. The turntable here was made in 1907 and moved from the Central of Georgia Railroad Shops in Columbus, Georgia. The Central's first table was not originally motorized. Railroad Structures and Estimates in 1909 explained that a turntable is supported on the center pier and pivots on conical rollers or steel balls encased in a box with bearing plates under, bolted to the masonry. The Central of Georgia maintained similar equipment and buildings in many of its shops, and a turntable photographed at the Columbus shops looked very similar to the one in Savannah. New roller bearings were installed in the turntable box circa 2003, and the current turntable operates on three bearing points rather than a center pivot. As turntable technology changed to support larger locomotives, the Central used manual fifty-foot tables about 1851 through 1855, probably steam-powered tables by 1886, gasoline-powered tables by 1903, sixty-five-foot tables by 1906, electric seventy-five-foot tables by 1923, and in 1945 added five-foot extensions to both ends to make a table eighty-five feet long.

Savannah, Georgia · United States