Roller Door

A large steel roller door at the Eveleigh Paint Shop closes off the end of one of the workshop's eight rail roads. The door is corrugated steel, mounted on a horizontal drum above the opening, lowered to the floor on chain hoist guides. A pair of rail tracks runs out from underneath the closed door, the rails worn smooth where decades of carriages passed in and out. The door surface is painted in the workshop's pale industrial green, scuffed and dented at the level a passing carriage occasionally clipped. A small inset wicket door is set into one side at human height. The frame of the main door is steel section, bolted into the brick of the original 1887 main wing.

Roller doors at this scale were a later addition to the original 1887 brickwork; the doorways themselves are part of the original carriage-roads, but the rolling-shutter mechanism replaced the timber sliding doors that would have closed the openings when the building was new. The change reflected mid-twentieth-century industrial standards for secure and weather-tight enclosure. The Paint Shop continued in operation until 1989, by which time the rolling doors had been the standard arrangement for several decades. The door in this photograph is one of several along the eight-road frontage, each one closed when no rolling stock was passing in or out.