Car Repair Shop - Nevada Northern Railway East Ely Yards and Shops - Ely, Nevada
Posted by: 
Volcanoguy
N 39° 15.567 W 114° 52.245
11S E 683708 N 4347729
The Nevada Northern’s Car Repair Shop in the East Ely Yards.
Waymark Code: WMTQ9H
Location: Nevada, United States
Date Posted: 12/28/2016
Views: 0
The Nevada Northern’s Car Repair Shop is located center of the East Ely Yards. The following information comes from the NRHP files: (
visit link)
Built in 1944 and 1945, this is a two-story-high, steel frame building with gable roof clad overall in corrugated metal panels. Four large, moveable ventilators are placed along the roof’s ridgeline. Measuring approximately 50 by 320 feet, the building’s large, uninterrupted interior working space houses three tracks, and is lit by vertically-stacked pairs of 60-light steel sash windows that line its long north and south sides and its west end. Twenty-light center panels pivot out to provide ventilation. The building rests on a concrete block perimeter foundation. Two roll-up metal doors provide access to the two outer tracks through the east end of the building, and a smaller centered door provides a single track access to the west end, which lies approximately 150 feet east of the Engine House and Machine Shop Building. The building lies at a slight southwest-northeast angle parallel to the yard tracks, and was positioned to cover car repair tracks Nos. 1 and 2 which are similarly aligned and which determined the building’s alignment. Prior to the mid-1940s, car repairs were done out in the open on those tracks, apparently in all kinds of weather. Nearly forty years after its founding, the railroad finally erected a building to enclose the two car repair tracks; the tracks within the building are nearly four decades older than the building itself.
The building’s steel frame is exposed on the interior as are the steel roof trusses. Clear height within the building is about 50 feet, and a 15-ton traveling crane moves the length of the building within. The floor is earth and the three tracks provide sizeable capacity for rolling stock. Today the building is used to house some of the railroad’s active rolling stock, especially passenger equipment, as well as for making repairs on that rolling stock. Originally it functioned as an essential part of the railroad’s maintenance operations.