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.
The 604 certainly deserves the sprucing up. Nice job Greg !
ReplyDeleteThe 604 is an especially great piece of equipment, from the early days of the North Shore and IRM both. Does it operate? Last I recalled, it had a blown motor or two and was OOS. I last rode it during a snowflake special/North Shore weekend.
ReplyDeleteO. Anderson
Frank- Largely what you see in the picture is what you get; the car's derrick was used as a "sky hook" to support the upper messenger wire and the end of the bracket arm, and the arm and its diagonal brace were transferred to the new pole. The wire was dead and grounded, and the derrick wasn't moved while we worked. There was a come-along hoist under the derrick's lifting eye to lift and lower the messenger wire. The locomotive is out of frame. I'm in the bucket in the photo.
ReplyDeleteOlin- 604's propulsion is out of service. But its air system, and thus the platform hoist and derrick winch, are OK. It's towed to work sites. Motor work on it is a somewhat low priority; if I had to hazard a guesstimate for what it'll cost, I'd say a full job would be around $90-100k. (Two rewinds with heavy overhauls and two heavy overhauls only.) Thus, we deal with towing it. The car's tired, but irreplaceable for the use we make of it. So Gregg chips away at repairing it.
R. W. Schauer