Enola, PA: 1905 NS/Pennsy Enola Railyard and Roundhouse

Railyard: (Satellite)

Roundhouse: (Satellite)

Robert Wanner posted
Enola Yard facilities with a I1 Class 2-10-0 locomotive doing some switching in the foreground. Early 1950's I would think. Two diesel switchers show in the the photo, but cannot seem to find any electric locomotives under wire to the right. Otherwise all steam locomotive show in the photo. Also a good number of foreign freight cars including a string of gondola cars where the automobile frames are in a vertical position. Not my photo.

Street View

 

Michael Maitland posted
Came across this in my files.  Must have been a reprint in Rails Northeast.  Staggering amount of traffic.

Charles Crawford posted two images with the comment: "Aerial photo that I took over Enola Yards late 1970's showing roundhouse and turntable from a 2 seat upper wing Cessna - scan from 8x10 print, photo by Charles Crawford"

Charles Crawford: When my friend who was earning air time invited me to go flying as a teenager, I replied YES! Where do you want to go? Harrisburg Pennsylvania! We were asked to leave the Harrisburg air space, we were finished anyway. I even got to pilot the plane for a couple of minutes over the beautiful Pennsylvania countryside.

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Hump yard tower:

3D Satellite

Yard office?:

3D Satellite

"Enola Yard, located at the intersection of major routes—including New England, the south, Baltimore, the Great Lakes, the eastern seaboard and the west--was built to serve as a hub for sorting freight cars between these routes. Construction began in 1901 and the yard officially opened for service in January 1905. Eventually the yard would grow to cover 316 acres, stretching for four miles along the Susquehanna River....Originally riders rode the cars down the hump and used the car’s handbrakes to slow them. This process was automated in 1944 with the use of ‘retarders’ that grabbed each cars wheels and slowed them to the proper speed for coupling to other cars on the selected track....The highest number of cars ever handled was 20,661 cars in 1943." In the 1950s, the Conway Yard was built and the classification work moved from Enola to Conway. The humps were removed in the 1980s. When Norfolk Southern acquired Enola in 1999, it restored one of the humps in the early 2000s and shifted work from Conway back to Enola. [GardnerLibrary]

NS idled the hump on Sep 25, 2020. "Over the past year NS has idled the humps at Allentown, Pa.; Sheffield, Ala.; Linwood, N.C.; and Bellevue, Ohio, which had been the largest classification yard in the East. After Enola is idled, NS will have five active humps: Elkhart, Ind.; Conway, Pa.; Chattanooga, Tenn.; Birmingham, Ala.; and Macon, Ga. Last week NS CEO Jim Squires told an investor conference that the railroad was likely to idle additional humps." [Trains]

Enola is the yard on the west side of the river. I noticed that the Rockville Bridge is just a little north of this yard. That would explain why the caption of so many railfan photos of that bridge indicate that the train is headed to Enola. Judging from satellite images, the yard on the east side as been converted to intermodal work.

1947 Harrisburg West @ 1:24,000