Okay. How DO you accessorize a burro crane (no fashionistas, please)?
There are those great days when all three of my remaining brain cells MU and can produce great notions, and I can actually follow up on some of ‘em here and there.
Today is not one of those days. In fact, my brain has vapor locked… But here is what I’m looking for and its kind of specific, so it may take a crane operator or another rail to answer:
A work train is picking up scrap rail. A Burro crane is using tongs to lift longer pieces of rail, where there is a steel beam with a pair of tongs at locations nearer to the ends, making 73 foot long lifts more balanced and manageable. If you know, what is this accessory called, or what have you heard it called? I need to find one in HO scale detail parts for a work train I'm building and I can’t remember what it is/was called.
Thanks in advance.
Hurry, because I don't want to wake up screaming at 03:00 again.
Nah.
I’ll probably need the next day of full lucidity to remember to check for an answer… so there’s no hurry.
The good news is the voices have stopped, but those little blue pills really zone ya out....
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Comments
What you are describing sounds like what I have always known as a 'spreader beam'. We used them frequently on board ship when making 'single point lifts' using the 'jumbo' derrick. It was usual to have only one 'Jumbo' on a regular freighter so a 'spreader' had to be employed when handling lengthy items of cargo, such as locomotives, railroad passenger carriages or lengths of hot rolled steel rails etc..
In the UK there is a lifting equipment company called 'Arbil' who supply lifting equipment dedicated for the railway industry, including rail spreaders. If you 'Google' their site, you will probably see illustrations of them. I am sure that there are similar companies in the US.
They usually fall into two types. One type has a single central lifting point, so is subject to considerable bending stress when in use. The other type has two lifting points arranged immediately above the position of the rail 'tongs'. This type has minimal bending stress but because the upper lifting connections angle together to meet at a common point, a compressive stress will be set up in the spreader. This means in a model, if it is to look authentic, a spreader beam made from a relatively deep girder section is needed. To minimise the self-weight bending stress of the rails, they should be picked up at the 'points of contraflecture'. The usual 'rule of thumb' positions for regular sections are taken as two ninths of the total length in from each end, roughly 16ft 2-1/2in. for 73ft rails.
Try not to wake up screaming at 3 am, it might upset the neighbours.
Ironically, I overheard a Section Crew conversation just last week. There were several guys preparing their hydraulic boom hy-rail truck for a day of work. I heard one of them say, "We'll need to take a 'lift beam' too". And two of the guys started towards the spot where several of these implements were laying on the ground. Now, whether that's the catalog description or a regional slang, I do not know.