During my December research trip up to Nebraska, Jim Krzycki of the
Schuyler Historical Society let me scan several photos, one of which
was the attached (with his permission).
On the rear is written
"Helen & Joe Novotny
Mom - Mary Vrba
turn table Burlington"
(Mary Vrba was Jim's grandmother)
I couldn't believe what I was seeing, "knowing" that the turntable at
Schuyler was a metal "Armstrong" table. It has taken me 4 months to
resolve my misunderstanding.
I know about "gallows" turntables, but had only seen photos where the
central tower was an A-frame. Also, gallows tables were common from
post-Civil War through the 1880's or so, but were rapidly replaced by
the newer iron or steel tables. I had never seen one with an "H"
frame.
But a lot of Googling brought me to Thayer County, just above the
Kansas border, and this photo of what looks like the same design of
turntable at Chester:
http://www.casde.unl.edu/history/counties/thayer/chester/image.php?image=2
That table is missing the near-side upper cross bracing, but it is
unmistakably the same construction as the Schuyler photo. I'm
attaching an enlarged version where I've been able to undo some of
the banding from the unfortunate scan, and also have an email into
the Thayer County Historical Society to try and locate the original.
I guess I'm prone to flights of imagination, but I'm imagining that
the "gallows" table was the original one installed in summer of 1887,
and the reason it lasted so long was due to the low traffic volume on
the Ashland-to-Schuyler branch. Sometime between 1922 and the 1938
USDA aerial photo, it was replaced by a metal table with no
superstructure.
Unfortunately, I'm having trouble trying to find Q annual reports
online, and the time period 1922 to 1938 represents 8 reels of
microfilm of the Schuyler newspaper, of which the Nebraska State
Historical Society will only loan two at a time. So the question of
just when the turntable was replaced will need to wait.
Does anyone have a company plan of the gallows turntable? Lacking
that, I'll perspective-correct the Chester photo and scale the table
based on the K-1 locomotive it's carrying (interestingly, the same
class as #608 and #625 which were assigned to the Schuyler run
pre-WWII).
Randy
--
Randy Gordon-Gilmore
http://www.prototrains.com
randy@prototrains.com
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1922-03-05_Schuyler_NE_TT.jpg
Description: JPEG image
1938 turntable.png
Description: PNG image
chester2j-scale-curves.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
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