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Will It Go Round in Circles (continued)
The roundhouse, turntable
and car sheds are easy to spot on this Marvin Davis
drawing in the lower left corner (above - detail below). This drawing was the
one that Walt Disney and Herb Ryman relied on to create the drawing that
Roy Disney would use to sell New York financiers on the concept of the Park.
Walt knew that "dreams offer too little collateral," and he
knew that he would need to have a "visual aid" to help explain to bankers
exactly what he had in mind for his Park. Over a weekend in September 1953,
Disney artist Herbert Ryman and Walt worked to create just such a drawing—a
bird's-eye-view of the park that, by all accounts, was successful in portraying
Walt's vision. Ryman relied heavily on Marvin Davis' second-generation Hub plan
in creating his masterful work.
Herb Ryman's overhead view of the proposed Park
was well-enough received
that Disney was able to secure the financing deals he
needed to begin the project.
The drawing is a wondrous rendering of the Park, showing a
property "approx. 45 acres within railroad tracks." And in keeping with the
original Davis plan, Ryman dutifully drew a detailed version of the railroad's
servicing facility.
A four-stall brick roundhouse lay next to a nicely sized
turntable. The turntable could be used as a "bridge," for backing the passenger
cars into their own, separate brick storage shed, which had a skylight running
the length of the building.
The elaborate brick roundhouse, car shed and
turntable in Ryman's
drawing may have been too costly for the cash-strapped
Walt Disney
Dreams may not offer collateral, but they are often
expensive nonetheless. Even Walt had to face this reality in building his theme
park. Turntables, semi-circular brick roundhouses to store his locomotives and
separate brick car storage structures were a tad more than Roy would allow, and
so, eventually, the wonderfully-realistic service facility was abandoned.
We get our first hint of what the actual roundhouse would
look like in Peter Ellenshaw's 40" x 90" painting that Walt Disney used to
introduce his theme park to the world on Disneyland, which aired October
27, 1954. Once again changing locations, the roundhouse is shown (actually,
more like "hinted at") in the upper left-hand corner of Ellenshaw's painting.
Here, for the first time, the facility exists outside the berm, but is finally
placed in the position it would occupy in reality.
Walt Disney in front of Peter Ellenshaw's masterful birds-eye
view of Disneyland.
The roundhouse can be glimpsed in the upper left-hand corner, above Walt.
Appearing as nothing more than a dark
horizontal smudge, the Disneyland
roundhouse is shown where it would eventually be built, just beyond
the berm, across from the Rivers of America.
So, the servicing facilities of the new Disneyland railroad
were scaled back from the first iterations. The roundhouse as actually
constructed at Disneyland was in reality nothing more than a corrugated metal
engine house, including a modest machine shop, with a "pole barn" extending out
the back to shelter the two train sets from the weather.
The roundhouse was built ahead of schedule, for one reason:
Disney had started constructing his first locomotives, the E.P. Ripley
and the C.K. Holliday at the studio, but two of the major components
were outsourced. Wilmington Iron Works of Los Angeles had built the frames, and
Dixon Boiler Works, also of Los Angeles, fabricated the boilers. |
