Roundhouses are buildings used by railway companies to enable efficient maintenance work to be carried out on their locomotives and rolling stock. They are in essence a large circular building with railway tracks entering all around the circumference like the spokes of a wheel. Once the locomotive has been driven inside it can be worked on and then sent out again on any of the other lines. One of the first roundhouses ever to be built was actually in Derby in England and it would appear that the design was so good little has ever had to be changed since.

The Pankow-Heinersdorf Roundhouse and the other buildings which make up this railway maintenance site are  situated in the north of Berlin and was part of the GDR (East German) railway maintenance infrastructure. We wandered on to the site with Will Swain during July 2013 and had a reasonably interesting hour or so, but to be perfectly honest, industrial sites are not really our bag, and there is a limit to just how many photographs you can take of a building like this before you become incredibly bored!

 

So... for what it's worth here are some of the photos we took.

 

Below is a selection of the photographs we took in and around the Pankow-Heinersdorf Roundhouse in July 2012.

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Seen from the road the structure is grey and uninviting.

 		 The buildings on the site are quite heavily tagged unfortunately.

 

The dome of the roundhouse is constructed almost completely with pine planking.
 
The dome itself is quite a work of art.


 

This was probably part of the fume extraction system. The noise and smoke and smell in here must have been nigh on unbearable when it was a working installation.
 

 Bright sunlight + wide angle lens = rainbow colour explosion!


 
What a happy chappy!

 		 Will and Tracy just doing their thannnng!

 

One of the few remaining overhead hoists that would be so necessary in a workshop like this.
 
Basically a motorised chain hoist, these can lift many tons.

 		 I love the irony of this particular tag!

 

We have left the roundhouse proper and have gone into the adjacent semi-circular workshop complex.
 
A sheer legs type structure for heavy lifting.

 

An engine inspection pit allows engineers to get underneath the locomotives.
 

 There are several of these inspection pits in this area of the site.

 

Outside we found a large turn table for switching locos from track to track.
 

 Part of the turntable mechanism.

 		 Arty-farty chimney shot!

 

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