What is a Railway Rotary Platform?

This image of the photographer Alex S. MacClean shows an almost unreal prospect of a rotary exchanger rails in Minneapolis, USA. In it we see a number of locomotives in radially arranged around a platform designed to redistribute traffic in different ways.

The system works through a central bridge that connects the road and both ends of the routes chosen So that the locomotive can continue its path. Such rotating platforms born with the first steam engines, which were traveling in one direction only, and should be given back to the end of the journey. It was later used to organize the car trains, but by the 1940s began to come into disuse by the emergence of modern locomotives.

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