Working rail roads and their tracks.

[MossRoad]

Roundhouses and turntables have became a thing of the past. Turntables were high maintenance but necessary in their day when steam was king. Wye tracks are hardly any maintenance comparatively and when power needs to be turned only the lead unit needs to face the direction of travel. There are very few turntables left anymore. Cool photos from when it was a booming place up through now where it's just rubble.

Surprisingly, there are still quite a few active turntables. I stopped looking about 9 years ago, but as a hobby, I used to sit around and night and follow RR tracks around the country on Google Earth and document the location of current and former RR roundhouses, turntables, transfer tables, etc... I had many hundreds. When I retire I'll make the file into a usable PDF and post it.

Here's a google earth shot of Chicago. It only took me a few minutes to find 5 active turntables and three active roundhouses.

 

[GrandpaSmurf825]

The one that's just above I-55 in Chicago is the one I was referencing as still being there. The other one is now gone. No roundhouse in conjunction with it though and the only reason they have that is because real estate is at such a premium they don't want to commit any to a wye track. They did just complete a large intermodal expansion in the yard there however.