These buildings formed the heart of the Red River and Gulf Railroad and the Crowell lumbering operations. The engine house, known as the roundhouse despite its shape, housed locomotives and handled basic servicing between runs, while the machine shop performed major repairs and made parts for nearly everything used by the railroad, the woods operations, and the sawmill. The machine shop appears to have been built before 1912 because it appears on a valuation map from that year. The engine house appears on a 1921 valuation map as a three-track facility, but it does not appear in photographs taken in 1916, so it was probably built during the 1919-20 expansion. By the early 1920s it had been rebuilt as a four-track engine house and remained that way until the railroad ended in 1954. Similar engine facilities at various times existed at Alco, Hutton, Sieper, and Meridian to service locomotives and equipment assigned to those lumber camps and sawmill towns. In 1949, the engine house on this site was destroyed by a cyclone and rebuilt using framing and sheeting salvaged from the Hutton and Alco facilities in 1944 and 1945. Behind the machine shop stood the parts house and the car shop, known as the Car Knocker's Shed because railroad workers who built and repaired log cars and other railroad cars were called car knockers. In the car shop, all of the Crowell wood log cars were built and rebuilt as needed, and cabooses, passenger cars, and other specialty cars were maintained. The car shed was also built during the 1919-20 expansion. Most of the machinery in the machine shop is operational, making it one of the very few functioning belt-driven machine shops remaining in the United States. Meridian Lumber locomotive #202 is stored inside the machine shop, and Red River and Gulf locomotive #106 and an almost completed log car that was being built when the logging railroad shut down in 1954 are stored in the Car Knocker's Shed.