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.
To
view any of the photographs in a far bigger size then click on the
image of your choice and it will open in a new window.
Click right on the
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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.