Motive Power Depot - Engine Sheds in The Steam Era

Engine Sheds in The Steam Era

Engine sheds could be found in many towns and cities as well as in rural locations. They were built by the railway companies to provide accommodation for their locomotives that provided their local train services. Each engine shed would have an allocation of locomotives that would reflect the duties carried out by that depot. Most depots had a mixture of passenger, freight and shunting locomotives but some such as Mexborough had predominantly freight locomotives reflecting the industrial nature of that area in South Yorkshire. Others, such as Kings Cross engine shed in London, predominantly provided locomotives for passenger workings.

Nearly all depots at this time had a number of shunting locomotives. Normally 0-4-0T or 0-6-0T tank engines, these would be allocated to shunt turns and could be found in goods yards, carriage sidings, goods depots and docks.

It should be noted that many large rail connected industrial sites also had engine sheds primarily using shunting locomotives.

Read more about this topic:  Motive Power Depot

Famous quotes containing the words engine, sheds, steam and/or era:

    There is a small steam engine in his brain which not only sets the cerebral mass in motion, but keeps the owner in hot water.
    —Unknown. New York Weekly Mirror (July 5, 1845)

    One sheds one’s sicknesses in books—repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    “If Steam has done nothing else, it has at least added a whole new Species to English Literature ... the booklets—the little thrilling romances, where the Murder comes at page fifteen, and the Wedding at page forty—surely they are due to Steam?”
    “And when we travel by electricity—if I may venture to develop your theory—we shall have leaflets instead of booklets, and the Murder and the Wedding will come on the same page.”
    Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)

    ... most Southerners of my parents’ era were raised to feel that it wasn’t respectable to be rich. We felt that all patriotic Southerners had lost everything in defense of the South, and sufficient time hadn’t elapsed for respectable rebuilding of financial security in a war- impoverished region.
    Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 1 (1962)