Talk:Railway turntable

Accidents sub-section
Just added a citation to an earlier Supreme Court case involving turntables to the Accidents section. Not sure if we should keep/merge the information with the Chicago B. & Q.R. Co. v. Krayenbuhl case, but I didn't want to just delete the discussion of Krayenbuhl out of hand. Rdxtion (talk) 23:55, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

title change
I wonder why this article was moved, in June 2011, from Turntable (rail)? As shown in the body of the article, the thing is known as a "turntable", not a "railway turntable", so the correct Wikipedia title is the term by which it is known, with a disambiguator. The disambiguation page at Turntable (disambiguation) should, I suggest, be at Turntable (currently a redirect) and include the rail version alonside the record player at the top of the list as the two near-primary usages of the word, but when the rail version is called "Railway turntable" it runs the risk of even being removed from the dab page as a "partial disambiguation". Pam D  08:59, 17 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Pam's right. Both my railway dictionaries just list it as "turntable". It needs a disambiguator. However, "(rail)" isn't really right - there is no such thing as a "rail turntable" - it's a fudge to avoid having to choose between the US term "railroad" and international (UIC) term "railway". Not sure how we easily get round that. --Bermicourt (talk) 09:25, 17 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't necessarily agree that there's anything wrong with "railway turntable" as a way to refer to a specific kind of turntable -- of course the additional word "railway" isn't going to be used in a railway context, but that doesn't mean it's wrong as the title of an article on Wikipedia, which is a general-purpose encyclopedia.
 * However, if the consensus were to move it back to a title starting with Turntable, I also don't see a thing wrong with Turntable (rail). We use (rail) as a suffix in other articles, such as Subway (rail) (which is a redirect, but that's beside the point). --Tkynerd (talk) 16:47, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Useddenim (talk) 00:28, 18 December 2011 (UTC)
 * IMHO,
 * The disambiguation page should be named Turntable
 * Railway turntable should be named Turntable (rail)
 * A new page named Turntable (phonograph) should redirect to Phonograph » Turntable technology
 * Laser turntable should probably be added to the disambiguation page.
 * }
 * I think you should read WP:PRIMARYTOPIC and then explain why you think Phonograph is not the primary topic for Turntable. But you should make that explanation at Talk:Turntable, not here. --Tkynerd (talk) 02:16, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

Anybody like "Locomotive turntable" as a title, seems the best solution to me? Maelli (talk) 09:45, 13 October 2016 (UTC)

USA-centrism
> This is especially true in areas where economic considerations and/or a lack of sufficient space have served to weigh against the construction of a turnaround wye. <

The above reads as if turnaround wyes are the norm. I would submit that, in worldwide terms, turntables are far more commonly used than wyes to turn locomotives. -- Picapica (talk) 12:42, 26 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Point understood. The WP article, Wye (rail) (see section For turning equipment), points out that there has been a tendency to use wyes more extensively in North America and Australia and why that has been so.  I am of the opinion that the quoted comment is not invalid, per se, and that, perhaps, its deficiency in the area of WP's goal of "non-centrism" could be cured by using it as part of an explicit comparison of North American/Australian practice with rest-of-the-world practice and the reasons for the difference.  In this connection, it would be particularly helpful if someone could provide some kind of historical context - how was the issue of turning equipment handled in, for instance, long-settled areas of Europe before the advent of the turntable?  If you have an idea on how to do that, perhaps you could write an appropriate edit.  NorthCoastReader (talk) 01:43, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments, NCR. They encourage me to feel that I wouldn't be acting too non-consensually in editing the article in the direction you suggest. I must admit that I hadn't done more than glance through the articles on the turnaround wye or the balloon loop. Now that I have, I see there are even more instances of limited perspective there: single-cab diesel locomotives do exist in Europe but they are hardly the norm outside of shunting (switching) operations, and the first article does not mention electric locomotives even once! And as for > Many streetcar and tram systems use single-ended vehicles that have doors on only one side and must be turned at each end of the route < -- well, I have to say that I've yet to see a non-reversible tramcar, or one with doors on one side only, in any country, though presumably they must exist in North America. I suspect that in Europe the more likely reason for the laying of balloon loops on tramway systems in the past is the previously much more widespread practice of towing unpowered trailers.

Anyway, I can see that there is plenty of work to do! BTW, every part of Europe is long-settled :-) and I believe that turntables were there right from the start, as they developed from the "turnplates" used on mining and other industrial wagonways and which abounded in early-to-mid 19th-century stations, both passenger and goods, for marshalling trains: for locomotives, turnplates became the more substantial turntables as locos got heavier and longer, and turnplates for handling other rolling-stock were abandoned as impractical within stations once all rolling stock became too large to be easily manhandled. -- Picapica (talk) 15:28, 27 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Picapica, you might need to broaden your horizons. Trams with driving cabs only on one end and doors only on one side were common in the mid-twentieth century in Sweden, where I lived for a number of years and where I volunteered on Djurgårdslinjen, where we ran several cars of a type once common in Sweden with those characteristics. Example: . I believe similar cars were used in the other Nordic countries as well. Best regards, Tkynerd (talk) 03:49, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

You are right, Tkynerd. (And as for broadening horizons, om bara jag hade pengar!). To be fair to myself, I was only saying that I couldn't recall seeing a unidirectional tram, but then my experience of tram travel is principally confined to modern systems in Britain, France, and Benelux (I still think, however, that non-reversible trams are an increasingly minority phenomenon these days worldwide). To be fair to you too, though, I was forgetting about trams in Russia and the former "Eastern Bloc" which, now I recall riding on them, were indeed doors-on-one-side-only. It would appear that the design of Stockholm trams was more "eastern" than "western" in this regard. Would it be true to say that their door configuration was a major factor leading to the abandonment of the Stockholm tramway system after Dagen H? -- Picapica (talk) 09:22, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Multi-gauge turntable
The article says:


 * The last remaining 3-gauge turntable in the world, used to station trains into the 23 bay roundhouse, exists at the Steamtown Heritage Centre in Peterborough, South Australia.[15]

The turntable at Brookville Equipment Corporation, a locomotive manufacturer, appears to have 8 rails. They make mining equipment as well as standard-gauge locomotives, so they have to handle an extreme range of gauges. See this blog post for a photo of the turntable. The turntable is located here: 41.15118°N, -79.06557°W. Most of the tracks into the factory are only dual gauge (standard and Cape Gauge, because that is the most common gauge for mining equipment in North America), but the test track and one track into the factory seem to have all the gauges. Douglas W. Jones (talk) 16:17, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

And what about this turntable at the Škoda Transportation works in Plzeň: 49.73573°N, 13.35199°W? I believe this photo to show the approach to that turntable -- you can just see the turntable bridge in the background, positioned perpendicular to the track leading to the pit from the 3-gauge switch in the foreground. Douglas W. Jones (talk) 14:30, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Another very unusual, maybe THE most unusual, tt.
I'm British, but living in Germany, and I've seen pictures here of a very unusual tt system, consisting of TWO turntables where the pits overlap - I'll try and find one of those pics and post it, I think it was somewhere in Hamburg. Maelli (talk) 09:49, 13 October 2016 (UTC)

Sector plate example
As a page for Sector plate hasn't yet been written up, this seems to be the best place to note that this seems to be an example of a sector plate (OpenStreetMap) in the corner of an industrial site at Thann in France. It can also be identified on aerial imagery. Philh-591 (talk) 20:19, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Surviving Class I U. S. Turntables
Union Pacific has one next to the (currently idle) locomotive shop at Dallas Yard in El Paso, Texas. CSX has one at the Conway Yard locomotive shop just north of Pittsburgh, Pa. 174.247.250.95 (talk) 02:48, 3 March 2022 (UTC)