The roundhouse was completed in October 1922, coinciding with the opening of the Coastal Line section of Taiwan's West Coast Line, connecting Zhunan to Changhua. At first, the building had only six stalls. Demand grew quickly: eight stalls by 1923, ten by 1924, twelve by 1933. During World War II, Allied bombing damaged stalls 5 and 6, but the structure survived. As Taiwan's railways evolved, so did the roundhouse. In 1970, the arrival of R20 diesel locomotives required platforms to be fitted in stalls 1 through 7 for maintenance. A decade later, when E100 electric locomotives entered service, stalls 1 and 2 were adapted again. The roundhouse was never frozen in amber. It changed with each generation of rail technology, absorbing the new while retaining its original form.

By the 1990s, Taiwan's railways needed larger maintenance facilities, and the Changhua Roundhouse was slated for demolition to make way for a modern depot. Local residents and heritage advocates fought the plan. Their argument was simple: this was the last one. Every other roundhouse in Taiwan had already been destroyed. Demolishing Changhua's would eliminate the final physical link to an era of railway history. The pushback succeeded. The depot was built south of Changhua railway station instead, and on 25 October 2000, the roundhouse was officially designated a county monument. The government's rationale cited the building's unique architecture and its significance in Taiwanese railway history, a formal acknowledgment of what the community had been saying all along.

The roundhouse is not a museum in the conventional sense. It remains operational, still used by Taiwan Railway for maintaining and storing rolling stock. Visitors can watch the turntable in action, rotating locomotives between stalls like a mechanical dance. As of 2020, the roundhouse displays two steam locomotives: CK124, a CK120 class engine derived from the Japanese National Railways Class C12 design, and DT668, a DT650 class locomotive based on the JNR Class D51. These machines, built to haul freight and passengers through Taiwan's mountainous interior, sit in the same stalls that sheltered their predecessors a century ago. The fan-shaped building that houses them is both archive and workshop, a place where history is maintained in the most literal sense.

Railway roundhouses were once common infrastructure across the world, essential to the age of steam when locomotives could not easily reverse direction and needed to be turned on a central table. Most were demolished as diesel and electric traction made them obsolete. In Taiwan, the pattern was absolute: five roundhouses destroyed, one saved. The Changhua Roundhouse endures because people valued it before the government did. It stands as evidence that heritage preservation is not always a top-down process. Sometimes it begins with residents who refuse to sign off on a demolition permit, who insist that a building matters not because it is efficient but because it is irreplaceable. The turntable still turns. The fan still opens. That is the point.