The Nichols Engineering Company of Chicago manufactured turntables and transfer tables in the middle part of the last century. Would anyone know if this company or a form of it is still in business? Do their archives survive somewhere? We are about to restore our transfer table. Drawings and specifications would be really helpful. Thanks.

They were still building turntables in 1966.

Did Nichols have any manufacturing capability or were they the firm that did the engineering and planning for turntables and transfer tables? The turntable at the Midwest Railway Preservation Society ex-B&O roundhouse in Cleveland has a Nichols builders plate but we think that the builder may have been American Bridge. There may be a second Am Bridge builders plate down underneath the beams that cannot be seen without crawling underneath them, we have not found ours yet. The Am Bridge plates have been known to corrode and fall off over the years. The Nichols plate is right out in the open mounted on the steel just beneath the control shed on our turntable.

A little more information:

http://www.rypn.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=39260