Derrick in action

Our intrepid freelance photographer Greg Kepka sent along the above photo, taken during a recent foray on North Shore line car 604. A small crew of IRM volunteers was out on the railroad swapping hardware from an old line pole that had failed to a new line pole that was set alongside it. You can see that the two poles at right are lashed together, the good new one keeping the bad old one straight until the crossarm and wires can be transferred. Anyway, lifting hundreds of pounds of catenary off of a crossarm is no mean feat, but fortunately the 604 is well equipped for the job. It has a derrick mounted to its side frame and, while the derrick probably hadn't seen use for decades, it still worked like a charm as shown. Hopefully one of the people on the crew can chime in with more details but the derrick uses a combination of rope and wire rope, positioned with the help of an air motor driven off of the car's main reservoir. Sharp-eyed viewers will also notice that the 604 is being slowly but steadily spruced up, with fresh paint on parts of the car courtesy of Gregg Wolfersheim.