Keith Tanner wrote: Wow, that is cool. I never figured you'd be lifting locomotives when working on them, but I guess you have to sometimes. But actually carrying them around the shop? Eeek.
With a floating dry dock you can lift a cruise ship to work underneath it!
The first time I lifted a class 8 tractor cab on a setup like that it freaked me out. Naturally, I had to get under it right away and start working on it. It was fine, but just seemed odd.
Don't worry, if it comes down, it will be so hard and so fast you won't even know it.
No rescue equipment needed, just a mop.
Rupert wrote: Everything is relative, as anyone who has ever worked at a heavy railroad locomotive shop will tell you. Our shop was two locomotives deep per track and about a block and a half wide. Each track was on a 25' center. Various operations are done in different areas of the shop. So often a locomotive will be carried from one area of the shop to another by overhead crane at least two or three times while under repair, even more for a full rebuild. So of course they pass over all the other locomotives and workers in their path. The first few times a 100+ ton locomotive passes over your head while hanging from a 75' high overhead crane and traveling at a fast trot you duck. After a week or so you don't even look up. Now OSHA has made that process much safer. They can only pass a 100+ ton locomotive over your head if you are wearing a plastic hard hat. That always made me feel so much safer.
Wow! I don't think I would ever get use to a locomotive passing over my head suspended by a crane!
Rupert, What shop did you work in? A lot of my family worked for GE transportation in field service. I worked as a technical consultant for special projects on Amtrak, BNSF, and UP.
Another fun one is when I was in Germany at the Caterpillar Engine production facility in Kiel. They mad engines for ocean going ships there. You see these huge V16 diesels just moving right on down the production floor moving to the next station. Fun stuff.
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