Jim Massfeller of Fort Mill, SC has been posting a series of great photographs and detailed information of a South Carolina rail museum's relocation of a railcrane to an email list (speeders@lists.cirr.com) I belong to. You can see the photos here;


http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v329/Trainman-2/1947%20Locomotive%20Crane/


I believe the crane is being moved about 10 miles from an abandoned spur in a stone quarry to the railroad museum's live track. Its costing $26,000 for the move due to the special rigging and the need to reinforce a road bridge the crane must travel over. If there is some interest I will post the email from the actual move once it is posted.

Here is his email;

Hello Again Everyone.

I am just back from a day at the quarry and even though I am not
personally doing the work, I am still pooped.

Got issues resolved with the third power company and had two low wires
raised. We will have to lift a few telephone and TV cable wires during
the move which is no problem.

The PutFile site seems to be working normally tonight so I am posting my
photos there again. Let me know if you have problems with them. The site
came back up this morning just after I re-posted some photos to another
site.

Today was a lot of small stuff.

First I learned about Duey Dag Rods (Spelling?) which were designed for
building bridges but these guys have adapted them to their needs. They
are threaded for quick spin on of the nuts and when the nuts are set in
to the recessed washer like thingies, they do not loosen up under a
load.

http://tinyurl.com/ek3yk

They used these rods to hold everything together and it is pretty slick
how they did it. They asked and got permission to cut a few holes in the
deck of the crane to insert the rods. Here you can see one group of the
rods in place. This is the left side of the crane and the yellow beam is
sitting on the black beams which sit on the deck.

http://tinyurl.com/gfdjr

Here you can see the crew assembling the rods. The steel pieces that
connect the two rods together on the top and the bottom are 2" thick and
it takes two guys to lift them and hold them in place while the washers
and nuts are spun on.

http://tinyurl.com/kf8ey

Here you see the right front of the crane with all of the rods in place.
Note that the yellow beam is about 3" above the black cross beams. You
can also see cribbing holding a hydraulic jack. They have four jacks on
the right side of the crane that will lift it up to the yellow beam and
then they will tighten up the rods.

http://tinyurl.com/znqov

All of the jacks will be hooked up to a hydraulic pump and when they
throw the switch, the entire right side will rise up like magic. WOW!

The ground here is not really level so the right side has to be lifted
up for everything to be tightened up. I learned today that the dollies
have a hydraulic jack with a 16" lift capacity and these will be used to
lift the crane for the highway move. Note the cylinder in the center of
the dolly below.

http://tinyurl.com/e8poj

Another thing of interest is that they have selected a route to move the
crane over a bridge that won't hold the weight of the crane. Here is a
photo of the bridge.

http://tinyurl.com/elzx5

They will bring I a heavy duty portable steel bridge and place it over
the small concrete bridge just for the move.

Here is a photo taken with the small bridge on the right looking down
the old RR roadbed. If you look close you can see the crane in the
distance down the road bed to the left of the steel building.

http://tinyurl.com/g2vmj

The plan for tomorrow is to complete all of the rigging and then lift
the crane and pull it out to the road and park it behind where the white
pickup truck is in the photo above.

Tomorrow afternoon we will look at the weather forecast and decide when
to move the crane. The prediction is "Thunderstorms Likely" Thursday
morning but nice Friday. It the prediction holds, the move will be
delayed until Friday.

More to come tomorrow night...

Jim Massfeller
Fort Mill, SC

Darn, you beat me to it. I've been busy at work and haven't been able to keep up with RYPN lately. I logged in this morning to mention the crane move, and found it's already been mentioned!

I have to admit that I'm eating some crow these days. I was pessimistic about the crane ever moving. I tried not to hinder efforts to move it, but I always thought the project was doomed. You don't know how pleased I am to admit that I was wrong!

SCRM members Jim Massfeller and Larry Robb have both worked like dogs to make this move happen. They've ridden an emotional roller coaster as first one thing then another happened. The move was indefinitely postponed at least three times that I know of. The crane was threatened by the landowner several tiems as well. One of these threats resulted in Jim and Larry building a good 250 feet of temporary track with some old 80# rail and double-jaw gauge rods to move the crane from the disconnected track it was sitting on to a longer section of abandoned track out of the way of the landowner.

I'd probably have given up long ago and cut our losses by scrapping the crane. But Jim and Larry remained steadfast. I've never been happier to be proved wrong!

Things finally started going right when the boom was removed for repair a couple weeks ago. I believe the boom repair is being done as a donation but I don't know where. There were several cracks and old, poorly-done repairs from past damage. We know the crane has been turned over at least twice in its life, probably many more times. The boom shows it.

For my part in this (and to make up for being a naysayer), I've made sure the move is in "my" newspaper. On the front page! I also plan to be in attendance at the move with both my camera and video camera. Jim has promised that the Rock Hill cable news channel is going to cover the move, also, so we should have some good publicity.

The thing was originally going to move today, but it's been rescheduled for tomorrow (Friday, May 12, 2006). Rain was forecast for today, which wouldn't bother the movers. Apparently, however, the power company guys who have to raise a few wires for us don't work non-emergencies in the rain (can't say I blame them). Of course the sun's out this morning as I write this!

Larry Robb is sort of the crane's caretaker. He has already rebuilt the air compressor, which was extremely athsmatic when we bought the thing. It now pumps air just fine. The Cat engine runs like a Swiss watch -- that was the first of many things to amaze me about the old girl. I think Larry plans to replace the cables and drum brakes as well as do the necessary cosmetic work once the crane is safely in Rion. With any luck, we should be able to use it for MOW work and some public demonstrations in a few years.

Great pics! I can see why it costs 26 grand to move. When our organization moved the 100 GE diesel, we had the hauler provide "Schnozzles" which were welded and braced to the ends and then they lifted one end and put dollies under there hooking under the schnozzles. The other end had the tractor hook under those schnozzles. Then they lifted both ends until the wheels were 6" off of the ground. It was a lot less expensive than 26K.

But when we moved our Tidewater tank car three weeks ago, we craned it off of it's trucks onto a lowboy. The trucks were hauled up onto a rollback rated at 80,000#. I drove as the chase vehicle letting the driver know if he needed to stop for low wires since we were at 15' 2". He didn't. At the museum, they craned the trucks onto our track and then when we finally arrived, they craned the tank car onto it's trucks. All in all a great day!

Later!
Mr. Ed

Fifteen foot two! Back when I was actually doing this stuff, I had a driver tell me, "Son, if I hook a wire don't stop me. We're 15'-8". All wires are supposed to be sixteen feet off the pavement, and if they aren't today, they will be tomorrow."

That is exactly the way the driver put it too! But being consientous (?) he opted for side to side road movement to assure he was under the highest side of the wire. The only low point was right outside the park where telephone wires were around 14' if that. It only took a second to lift them and git!

Later!
Mr. Ed

Well, the crane is now safely in Rion. Whew! The move started at 9AM, the thing went thorugh the gate at Rion a few minutes before 2PM. All the rigging still has to be removed, that's to happen Monday.

As for wires... these guys had a pair of PVC pipes stretched overt the top of the crane's cab. I saw a trucker do the same thing hauling one of the steam locos to Railfair 99 in Sacramento. The PVC pipes allow the wires to just slip right over the top without snagging anything. In our case I think these were a "just in case" measure, I didn't see any wires even close to touching them. I might have missed them, though.

There were some worried house movers shortly after the crane left Anderson Quarry. It's uphill both ways out of there, pretty steep. The crane had a truck tractor pulling, a second truck tractor pushing, and a heavy-duty forklift pulling the front truck. Right after starting up the hill, the hitch on the front truck failed. It was a pennel hook held to the frame with four good-sizd bolts. The weight just ripped it off the truck's frame like the bolts were made of balsa wood. Fortunately, the truck had another hitch that was welded to the frame, but they had to make some modifications with the "heat wrench" (AKA oxy-acetalyne torch) to make it work.

Then when they got to the top of thill, one of the 64 tires went flat. They just made sure it wasn't going to come off its rim and proceeded.

Jim & Matt,

Please keep posting anything and everything you can about your experiences moving your crane. You have a big following out here on the left coast. :-)

We're getting real close to trucking our American locomotive crane, and any lesson learned we can glean from your experiences can only make our move more successful.

As I recall, your crane is quite a bit lighter than yours. What was the final weight after you removed the boom, etc. Did you remove any other major items (counterweight, etc)?

Ours weighs in at 225,460 lbs without the boom and hook. Ours is rated at 40 tons on wheels, 50 tons on outriggers.

Our big problem is no matter where we load the crane onto trucks, we have to cross a minimim of two bridges, and to move it intact, means we either have to have the bridges engineered or put it on a REALLY lot of axles, which it puts it up high and causes all sorts of other problems.

The current plan is to disconnect the vertical drive shaft and then seperate the upper machinery deck (turret) from the lower section and truck them seperatly.

Greg

We thought for a while that we'd have to dissassemble ours, but fortunately we found a house mover who felt it could be moved intact (except for the boom).

The way they rigged ours was to clamp steel I-beams to the deck, then mount house moving dollies under these. They used a total of four dollies on each end, each dolly having four dual wheels. That added up to 64 wheels, although one went flat after only about a quarter of a mile. The railroad wheels wound up being about 6" off the ground. Since it's a locomotive crane, the kingpins are attached rather than just sitting like a freight car. The trucks were still chained up as an extra precaution.

We had to cross one relatively short bridge. The movers were skeptical it would take the weight, so they brought in a portable steel bridge similar to what the military uses. This was just a series of steel beams with ramps on either end and a textured running surface, which were set up on wood blocks on the pavement at either end of the concrete bridge deck.

I think the boom is 5 tons. With the boom, the manufacturer's data says the whole thing is 108 tons. Any weight savings from removing the boom was replaced with all the rigging, though. The truck drivers said it didn't feel like 100 tons, but then it DID break their pennel hook climbing the hill out of Anderson Quarry, so...

Our crane is rated at 15 tons with the hook at a 12' radius from the pivot point. With the boom all the way down I think it's something like 5K or 6K lbs. There aren't any outriggers on it, but it does have a locking mechanism on the trucks to provide some stability.

I'll try to get an article put together on the move complete with pix. I have a start since I did an article for my employer. It's not techncial enough for here, but I may be able to just expand it with more technical details.