The Diesel Age
With the end of steam, the Tank & Boiler Shop was rendered moot, and the last Shop building to be built became the first to be closed. The Machine & Erecting Shop continued to see use, albeit greatly decreased. A steam locomotive needs to be taken almost completely apart and then put back together countless times over the course of its life for periodic maintenance, while a typical diesel undergoes this level of disassembly at most once for a mid-life overhaul… barring any wrecks, such as the unfortunate locomotive shown below:
Reduced need or not, it would ultimately be Mother Nature that struck the killing blow to the Machine Shop. A particularly nasty winter gale blew the roof off in 1962-63, and Southern Pacific’s management decided to close it down rather than repair the roof. Light maintenance could be carried out in the Roundhouse, and anything requiring more serious attention could be hauled to SP’s larger Sacramento Shops.
Many roundhouses on the SP would meet their end in the late Fifties and early Sixties. The very reason that a roundhouse is, well, round, is so locomotives can be turned to face the right direction upon being brought out. Steam locomotives were usually heavily optimized for forward movement and so this feature was very important in the steam era, but diesels were different beasts that could run at full power and top speed in either direction. Across the Bay, Oakland would have its roundhouse torn down and replaced by a modern diesel shop in 1960. San Jose’s Lenzen Roundhouse would survive, but at the cost of more than half of its stalls. The Bayshore Roundhouse, however, was kept fully intact and busy in its role of stabling and servicing locomotives.
Passenger locomotives became guests at the Bayshore Roundhouse more frequently after the closure of its counterpart up at Mission Bay, with anything other than the most rudimentary upkeep delegated to Bayshore (day-to-day inspection was carried out at the 7th Street “Shops” – in reality a cramped set of open-air tracks and machines on SP’s multi-block terminal parcel).
As useful as the Roundhouse evidently still was for Southern Pacific, it was all ultimately contingent on the usefulness of Bayshore Yard itself… and this would eventually begin to wane.