I wonder what it was like to use one of these? It looks like (in person) like it could pick up some fairly heavy items (like a steam locomotive). Torque wasn't just invented yesterday and this thing looks like it has muscles flexing when it's just standing still. GET TO STEAMTOWN!
M
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I actually got to see one of these beauties at work. I was on the Ringling Circus in 1977 when we pulled into the trainyard at Champaign, Illinois. The siding assigned to the 35 car train must have been pretty old, because as the elephant cars (which always were the first two cars) neared their position, one of the rails broke loose from its decaying sleepers and the elephant cars ended up listing about 30 degrees to the left. The train stopped rather abruptly. One clown suffered a cracked skull (who would notice any difference? and a Bulgarian wom,an suffered a broken arm.
The show was very anxious that the cars not end up falling on thyeir sides completely, as that meant that eight or nine elephants would die being crushed by the one next to it in the car. They weighed in from 4,000 lbs for a small one like Karen up to 10,000 lbs for a big mama like Betty. It turns out that elephants can only lie on their sides for three hours before their lungs fill up with fluids and they drown.
It took about 45 minutes for the crane to arrive. It managed to lift the car a little past vertical in the opposite direction, so the rail could be replaced. Then the next elephant car was tilted so the rail could be replaced under it as well. Pretty high drama for a small town. Anyway, I was absolutely amazed at how smoothly the operator could get that thing moving. We can knock unions, but this operator was a real pro.
Later that season the train creamed a car in Rhode Island that parked too close to the tracks so that its occupants could watch the train, and the following season the train went off the tracks in the Baltimore railyard. Nothing tipped over then, though.
Dean Chambers
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