Have the Bucyrus records been preserved?

I presume you're referring to cranes. I know that at least some of the records have been preserved. A good place to start looking would be the Historical Construction Equipment Association (HCEA).

http://www.hcea.net

Thanks Hugh but they don't have any of the records and don't know who, if anybody, does. I am interested in railroad steam shovels. Two of these just changed hands. One is on railroad trucks and the other was converted to crawler tracks.

I would imagine Cat would have them at this point if they still exist.

According to Wiki:

Good day John,

We do not hold the records for these steam shovels. We hold the IP rights to the offshore crane sector.

Regards,

Randy Meyer

Sr. Business Development Manager


Sparrows

John,

I posted the question on the Stripmine message board (http://www.stripmine.org). I'll let you know if anything turns up there.

Hugh

Got his from Cat:

Thank you for your inquire. We do have some images of early model steam cranes and shovels. If you provide a specific model we maybe able to help you.

Caterpillar Heritage Services.

Back before Cat bought Bucyrus-Erie the old records were held in the company archives. I hope they didn't just dump them.

I happen to live in Erie, where my grandfather swung a sledhammer 10 hours a day to put the connecting pins in the treads on the old steam equipment.

I have Anita at the Erie County Historical Society looking through their archives (next month as they're completing a move this month) and bringing it up at their meeting of local societies. I'll let you know what I can find, if anything, or just let you know that this resource has been fully explored. I'll also contact our local library to see what information or leads they have.

I have heard locally that a car collector had his vehicles stored in the old plant and the roof leaked significantly, so if records were left they were likely destroyed, but I'll explore that possibility as well.

Susan Yosten
Railroad researcher
Erie, PA

Thank you Susan. What promted this search was the recent sale of two Bucyrus railroad shovels and the servival of a Marion shovel in New York. All three were reportedly used on the Panama Canal.

John and other interested parties,

Go to beoldtimers.org and look around---it's a site with newsletters, upcoming retirees' meetings (in Cudahy Wisconsin) and an archive of newsletters from 1915 forward with great articles. Here's some of what I discovered there:

"B-E Shovels on the Panama Canal" The 77 shovels delivered by Bucyrus to the Isthmian Canal Commission represented the lion's share of shovels used for the Panama Canal's construction. They also constituted about 1/3 of the total number of large shovels sold by the co between 1904-1907. etc"

Contact info for the group: Bucyrus (R) Oldtimers Association UA
Retiree Newsletter PO Box 563 Oak Creek, WI 53154-0564. Board members' phones are also on the site but I won't include them here.

From the Feb 1916 "Excavating Engineer" "Excavation from the Slides on the Panama Canal" We give below the amount of excavation from the base of the slides for the four weeks during December as noted. It may be observed that the three Bucyrus 15-yard dipper dredes, CASCADAS, GAMBOA and PARAISO, handled between 88 and 89 percent of this material." The article goes on to give the relevant figures. Note: there was also a ladder dredge named Corozol.

Explore, but be prepared to get happily lost!

How do you get to the newsletter archive? I clicked on "newsletter" and only found 1916, 2016 & 2017. "Search" doesn't bring up anything.