Trains in the Round

For nearly 100 years beginning in 1864, railway roundhouses outside the busy city of York serviced and stored steam locomotives of England’s North Eastern Railway. In 1960, when diesel and electric trainshad superseded the steam engine, the roundhouses were abandoned and then forgotten until engineers inspecting the site of a new rail operating and training facility discovered their foundations. Archaeologists are working to record and preserve the site, which is still called by its nineteenth-century name, “The Engineers’ Triangle,” before the new buildings are erected on top of the roundhouses. —Jarrett A. Lobell