What's new
What's new

Antique OverHead Crane - Operator Comparment Under Track

ajax_

Plastic
Joined
Jun 5, 2014
Location
Memphis,TN
I have this old crane. It is still attached to the track/trolley attached to the ceiling. There is a compartment where the operator would sit. Along the wall is a wooden ladder for the operator to climb to then access the walkway to the operator compartment in the crane. The hoist, cable and rest crane is still in-tacked. I am not sure if this still works as the power has been disconnected. I have been told by crane operators that this crane dates back to 1920's or 1930's. I am not sure of this.

I am looking for any information that anyone can give me regarding this crane. Thank you.
 

Attachments

  • IMG_0819.jpg
    IMG_0819.jpg
    95 KB · Views: 3,120
  • IMG_0816.jpg
    IMG_0816.jpg
    93.1 KB · Views: 3,163
  • IMG_0855.jpg
    IMG_0855.jpg
    96.5 KB · Views: 2,217
  • IMG_0858.jpg
    IMG_0858.jpg
    97.5 KB · Views: 1,405
  • IMG_0856.jpg
    IMG_0856.jpg
    100.3 KB · Views: 1,151
Last edited:
You have a monorail type of crane. My guess is it dates to the 'teens or 'twenties judging by the style of the hoist & crane cab. There is even the original foot-operated warning gong hanging beneath the crane cab floor, operated by foot pedal. Looking at the design of the hoist & trolley, I'd say it may have been made by either Cleveland Tramrail or Niles Shepard. Cleveland Tramrail is still in business, in Wickliffe, OH. Niles-Shepard is still in business in Montour Falls, NY. If you shine a good spotlight or flashlight up at the hoist, you should see the maker's name, a load rating (in tons), and possibly a serial or crane number. Contact the maker, and they (or their successors) will have records on the crane giving date of manufacture, load rating, travel speed and hook speed, operating current (AC or DC, voltage, frequency & phases if AC), size of wire rope in the hoist and the footage of wire rope.

Not sure what you want to do with the crane. If you intended to use it, it would need some serious upgrades to meet current OSHA and ANSI standards, and would need a load test, better OSHA compliant means for the operator to get to and from the crane cab. Been there and done that with some 1921 bridge cranes in hydroelectric plants. I've seen monorail type traveling cranes much like what you picture, and Cleveland Tramrail as well as Niles-Shepard build similar looking units. N-S built hoists and controllers that were dead ringers (or nearly so) for what you pictured.

A monorail type crane was often used in warehouse type operations for materials handling. It was quick, could be switched from one run of monorail to another to access all areas of a warehouse/loading dock. These types of monorail cranes were often used to handle things that were of consistent size/shape/weight, such as rolls of paper, rolls of sheet metal, spools of wire or cable. The travel speeds and hook speeds of this type monorail crane were a lot faster than bridge cranes used in machine shops or powerplants, and these monorail cranes were generally of much lighter capacity.
 
tdmidget and joe..many thanks for all the info....I am still looking for some markings as to manufacturer...I took a few more pictures....In your opinion...what do you think the value is? I have found a rigger to take this down....
 

Attachments

  • IMG_0854.jpg
    IMG_0854.jpg
    101.9 KB · Views: 761
  • IMG_0857.jpg
    IMG_0857.jpg
    94.9 KB · Views: 1,447
  • IMG_0853.jpg
    IMG_0853.jpg
    96 KB · Views: 1,303
  • IMG_0856.jpg
    IMG_0856.jpg
    100.3 KB · Views: 404
I can't help with the crane but I would love to know more about your building ,do you know anything of its' history ,what are you going to do with it ?
 
As old as that monorail crane is, it would cost a small fortune to bring it into compliance with today's regulations. Seeing hooks with no hook safety latches (or even the "tab" on the hook bodies for the latches) tells me that is one OLD crane which never had any updates. Starting to mess around with an old crane like that opens the proverbial can of worms in so many areas. A matter of upgrading ladders and platforms for the operator to board the crane, then upgrading the crane cab, upgrading exposed buss wires the crane draws its power from (now required to be enclosed in insulated guards), and then there's the matter of the crane needing a complete inspection- assuming the inspector does not find anything worn beyond acceptable limits or broken or needing repair/replacement- then a load test. In today's world, a crane such as the monorail crane would no longer have an operator's cab. It would be fitted with radio control, and the crane operator would be on the shop floor with a "belly box", using a couple of joysticks to control the crane and its travel. Most shops have gone to either pendant control or remote/radio control on overhead cranes as it is far more economical then keeping a dedicated operator up in the crane cab. If the operator is in the cab, then someone on the shop floor has to give signals to the crane operator while "walking" or "following" the load as the crane makes the pick and moves it along. The move to pendant control or wireless control lets the guy on the shop floor control the crane and eliminates the need for the dedicated operator. The other side of this is the argument that if the operator can't see the hand signals given from the floor, or if the operator does not understand a hand signal (different people give crane signals a bit differently, despite "standardized" hand signals for cranes), then the operator is supposed to hold the load until the people handling the load on the shop floor can make themselves understood to the operator.

In short, what you have is a museum piece. No one in industry would touch that monorail crane with a ten foot pole. Old cranes are a liability, and old overhead cranes in typical old industrial buildings can be a real nightmare. In unused industrial buildings, pigeons have a habit of getting in thru broken windows or open ventilators. Pigeons love to build nests on top of gearcases and motors on overhead cranes, and will even build nests INSIDE hoist drums. We saw this firsthand with some old bridge cranes in two of our remote hydroelectric plants. Back in 1983, when we took over these two old hydroelectric plants, I was involved in the engineering to design an expansion (adding two new hydro units to each plant) and an upgrade of existing plants (which had two units each dating to 1921). The original bridge cranes were intact, as they were in 1921. A party of surveyors arrived to make as-build measurements of the plants, and I was assigned to work with them. We needed to get some measurments of the bridge cranes- hook travel and max lift, distance between runway girders, etc. I climbed up onto the catwalk, then out onto the crane girder to board the bridge crane. I stepped up onto the end truck, and then found a short ladder down to the catwalk that ran along the "fishbelly" crane girder. A really BAD ladder, made of light angle iron led to the crane cab, and it meant climbing out onto it to get down to the cab, then swinging into the cab. Once in the cab, I found the main disconnect switch ( had a kind of wood shovel handle on it) and shoved it in. This powered up the crane. The crane had the old drum type "trolley car" controllers, two trolleys, two main hooks of 20 tons each. I started moving the crane along the runway rails. It had not moved in ages. It groaned and moved, and I notched up the controller and made the full run along the runway. The surveyors signalled to lower the main load blocks, so I started the two hoists lowering. I was startled by a loud commotion, and a cloud of dust and crap coming out the ends of the hoist drums. Pigeons had nested in the drums. Mud dauber wasps had attached their wasps nests on the working parts of the bridge crane. They got stirred up as well. All hell broke loose for a few minutes. When the dust, pigeons, feathers and wasps all settled, I lowered the hooks to the floor for measurements.

Whiting, who had made the crane, had the records on it, down to the type of lumber used on the catwalk and cab floor. Whiting's service people advised us to have the drums UT's as pigeon shit inside of hoist drums on old/little used bridge cranes had corroded things dangerously thin.

We spent a bundle on those old cranes to bring them up to standards and to pass crane inspections. As we upgraded the electrics, we ran into loads of asbestos insulation on some of the wiring, crumbling/friable asbestos in the old "trolley car controllers, and asbestos/transite board in the resistance banks for controlling motor speed. Parts were worn, bearings had not been lubed in years as no one went up and out on those cranes to do a detailed and regular maintenance. Even the pins and sheaves in the load blocks were so worn we had to make new ones. Hooks had to be dye penetrant checked and gauged for signs of spreading. Some of the wheels on the hoist trolleys were so worn and the rails had divots so the crane got stuck when moving with a load on the hooks. It was quite a process to put those old bridge cranes back into service. I've learned over the years that old bridge cranes can be upgraded, but it is extremely costly to bring them into compliance with modern standards and codes. A bridge crane in a powerplant, having box girders spanning over a turbine floor is a candidate for upgrading as it is often next to impossible to replace the box girders. A smaller hoist like the monorail hoist shown in this thread is a museum piece at best, and more likely scrap in reality.

My own advice would be to leave the old monorail hoist up where it is, if at all possible. Not sure what the new use of the building it is in will be. Some businesses that re-use old industrial space keep the old bridge cranes and let them add to the character of the place.
 
Hey thanks for advise..Yeh I new for sure it could not be used today in real operation...I was just not sure if it had value as an antique piece..Thank you...Have found no pigeons or wasps yet..thanks for warning...
 
Most folks who want "antiques" as antiques, want something small and easy to move and admire.

But I can't believe I am the only one-man shop (unconcerned with OSHA etc.) who would love to have a travelling crane to USE, perhaps for the labor of taking it down plus the value of the scrap. Too far away for me, but I's hope someone would come save it, if the owner is willing to work with him.

File this under "wistful" posts, not "useful".
 
Magnetic:

C'mon ! This crane is tailor made for a smaller shop. It's a MONORAIL CRANE ! You'd get away with about half the steel you'd need for a regular bridge crane. The downside is it cannot travel across the line of the runway (or monorail) like the trolley on a regular bridge crane.... But.... in a small shop, I am sure this is not a major concern. On the other hand, unless you have unlimited energy and patience, or can clone yourself, you'd wear yourself out climbing up and down from the crane cab to hook onto a load, the back up to the cab to raise/travel with the load, then up and down a bunch more times if you needed the load spotted and let down precisely- such as putting an engine into a piece of equipment.

The older cranes of this generation often had a system of pull-ropes so the operator could stay on the floor and walk with the load. That was first generation remote control of overhead cranes. I'd seen it used many times, and it always reminded me of a man working a hitch with multiple draft horses as he'd be handling somewhere around 6 or 8 pull ropes to control the hoist, trolley travel and main bridge travel.


Ajax:
The crane in this thread is a time capsule. It has NEVER been upgraded. If you look under the wooden cab floor, you can see what looks like the reflector for a light. That is the warning gong. On the really old overhead cranes, the operator had a foot pedal he'd stomp to ring the warning gong- same gong as was used on streetcars (as in the old song: "Clang, Clang, Clang went the trolley....). Of course, if you clocked someone with a load, you could also ring the gong, same as the boxing ring when someone was KO'd and the fight was over.

I am really curious as to who made that monorail crane. Shepard-Niles had a distinctive style to their hoists and motors and controllers. It's been awhile since I've seen an old Shepard-Niles overhead crane, but it would not surprise me if your monorail crane was built by N-S. It would be interesting to power it up and see how it worked. It would not surprise me if the old monorail crane fired right up. Big, simple contactors and nothing electronic on them to go awry with age. Short of oxidation on some of the contacts or perhaps on the motor slip rings, there isn't much to go wrong. Check the oil cellars on the motors (a lot of the older crane motors had bronze sleeve bearings and were ring-oiled, with oil cellars), check the other bearings for grease or oil, and slop on some open gear lube.... close in the main switch and see that the brakes let off ( cranes of this sort have solenoid/spring brakes which require power to release, and the spring causes them to fail "on"). If the brakes let off, go for a ride down the monorail. It looks like there is a network of monorail beam with switch-tracks to take the monorail crane into different areas of the building. Chances are also pretty good that a monorail crane of this type has a fairly high maximum travel speed, but usually, there is a lever controller so you can creep or notch up to higher speeds.

Year ago, I was an erecting engineer for a firm that dealt in used medium speed diesel engines, steam turbines, and generators. It was a non union shop. One day, I was walking across the shop floor, in between assignments to jobs that could have been anywhere- the midwestern USA or South America or the Caribbean. The mechanic foreman hollered to me and asked me to do them the favor of running the bridge crane since they were needing to make a heavy pick of a diesel genset and did not have anyone they could cut loose to go run the crane. No formal training, no questions asked like: "Have you ever run a bridge crane ?", or "Are you familiar with this bridge crane ?". I climbed the ladders and boarded the crane cab, found the main disconnect and pushed it in, and swung out the operator's stool to sit on. Running a bridge crane is often "hurry up and wait", and plenty of crane operators took the newspaper or magazines up into the cabs as they spent a lot of time waiting once they were hooked onto a load. This was about a 25 ton P & H bridge crane with main and aux hoists. The plant owners were notorious for not spending any more than they had to, and this was before the era of stringent crane inspections. That bridge crane had next to no brakes left on the travel of the main bridge. No one had told me this fact beforehand. I got it rolling to move it for a pick, let off on the controller and stomped the bridge brake, and not much happened. I figured a few unkind thoughts as to the plant owners (who were also my employers at the time), and swung the controller to the reverse direction. The travel motor buzzed and hummed and things shuddered, but it did slow and stop the crane. I was quick enough to swing the controller back to centered position. After that, I made my moves cautiously, allowing room on the crane runway for "plugging the controller" to decelerate and stop the bridge. A few weeks later, I was back in the shop, and they had to make an even bigger pick, a diesel genset with an EMD 645 series diesel engine (locomotive type diesel). Two bridge cranes were needed- there were two on the same runway in that bay. I got tagged to run one, since I was now an "experienced" bridge crane operator. A young kid who was breaking in as a mechanic got tagged to run the other. His bridge crane was rated lighter than mine. The foreman gave him some mechanic's tie wire (aka "fence wire" or "baling wire") and told him to lash the main circuit breaker and turn the fan on it. Each crane cab had an ancient oscillating fan, the kind you'd see in oldtime offices, mounted on the back of the cab to blow cool air down on the operator. So, we got up on our bridge cranes and went to make the pick. My crane was rated for 25 tons, and this kid's was rated down around 15 tons. No one did a load calculation, as to which of our cranes got the heavier end of that genset. They had rigging ready made, matched slings, spreader bars and shackles all ready to go. We rolled down the runway, with me telling him how to plug the controller to make small moves and get stopped. We made the pick, with our bridges maybe 25 feet apart, each of us hooked onto one end of the skid base of this diesel genset. We spent most of the day up on our bridges, and it was a hot, boring kind of day. I never ran a bridge crane again in that shop. The next time was in 1983, when I ran the old Whiting bridge crane in the hydroelectric plant for the surveyors. In the ensuing 30 + years, regulations governing the use and inspection of cranes in general, whether they are mobile cranes or in-plant cranes such as bridge cranes, have gotten incredibly tight. I've seen it happen, and seen third-party crane inspection services write up all sorts of stuff on in-plant cranes to cover their own asses. The result is once this is on the formal inspection report, it has to be done. It costs bundles of money. Some is justified, but some is overkill. After awhile the old cranes get modernized rather than keep having to deal with deficiencies on the inspector's reports. Once this happens, seemingly simple and reliable old cranes wind up with programmable logic in the drive controls, and it takes quite some doing to get that working right. If it goes down, there is no tinkering or cleaning contacts to get things working again. It's usually a phone call that goes something like: "Your board's burned out.... the drive company obsoleted it last year..... it'll take 6 weeks to get a new board (or card)..... we can upgrade your drive a whole lot quicker...."At this point, you holler something like: "What the hell ?! You put the drive in our crane within the past five years. Now you tell me that it's obsolete ?! That's a crock of s--t. You're trying to sell us a new drive and a whole lot more. Why can't you fix the damned thing ? You have a contract with us to maintain our cranes and keep them in good operating shape." Some more up and back occurs, and you then call corporate and tell them their hotshot engineers who insisted on a full blown upgrade of the bridge crane, with all the latest bells and whistles, have just caused work on a major turbine outage to go dead in the water. This gets bucked up the chain of command, and you holler things like "Your engineers insisted on this last upgrade, and now we have a bridge crane that s--t the bed, and a turbine outage held up because of it. Whadda ya gonna do about it ?!" So, things get bucked further up the chain down in corporate, and the word comes back down off the mountain: "We'll go for the new drive upgrade to that bridge crane". Never mind that it is another 50 grand or so. Chump change when you are dealing with a turbine outage. I've seen bridge cranes go from reliable and simple to ridiculously complex in a span of 30 years. As an example of how crazy this has gotten: we have one elevator in the powerplant. It moves with the speed of molasses in January, but it is the only elevator which goes down into the plant. It is 40+ years old, and went through a few upgrades from the old electromechanical controls to solid state programmable drive with an AC motor. In 2007, I was running an outage on one of the units. I was responsible for the lock out and tag out. It meant a lot of going all over the powerplant, many times a day, so many trips in the elevator. One night, during the outage, I was headed home aboard my Harley. It was rutting season for the deer. Two doe came up out of a field onto the road I was travelling on. I braked and missed the first doe clean. The second tee boned my Hog, and I had her head very nearly in my face. I laid the Harley down, slid with it, then got free and slid on the pavement. I had good leather on, and slid like a man sliding into home plate. I was relatively unhurt- no road rash, no bruising, no breaks or dislocations that I could see at the time. I picked up the Hog, but a deputy sheriff convinced me to get it flatbedded and be driven home. I went back to work, and about that time, the elevator stopped working. I began doing LOTS of stairs. My left ankle started hurting badly. I took Advil and got a scrip for something stronger for the nights so I could sleep. I kept a bucket of ice in my office for my ankle. After a couple of weeks, still no repairs to the elevator and the ankle was no better. An MRI disclosed I'd broken some obscure bone (navicular or cannon- not sure, but they sound like the bones in a horse's hoof). I wound up in a splint and on crutches. The doc said if I had not been doing all those stairs, the fracture probably would have healed on its own. Meanwhile, the elevator company's men arrived on site. They told us the usual song and dance: "The drive we sold you is obsolete.... it'll be six weeks to get a new board". Same song as the bridge crane guys sing. So, I hobbled around and carried on, doing stairs after a fashion. One day, I was hobbling into the plant and the elevator mechanics were back again. One made some remark about my being on crutches. My temper got the better of me. I hollered out: "You sons of bitches get paid handsomely to upgrade and maintain our elevators. It's a damned good thing you are not working on elevators in a hospital- the place would become a mortuary. You should change your company name from Schindler to Schwindler." The elevator mechanics hollered back and I told them I'd wrap my crutch around their heads and I was using crutches because of them.

In short, old cranes (and elevators) are simple. They are reliable. Unfortunately, modern regulations have made it almost impossible to keep an old bridge crane operating in its original condition.
 
Joe those cranes sound like one I just ran on an outage. It wasn't a Whiting but a Shaw-Box. It had the "shovel handle" disconnect and the street car controls. It also had trolley problems. The Shaw-Box used the trolley axle as the drum shafts and a bearing was on it's last gasp. It is a dirt simple machine, most bearings were bronze bushings. It was built in 1957.
 
I would love to have that in the shop!! just have to find the right guy locally. Nice old piece it would be a shame to scrap in
 
Thanks for all the input...so it is most likely a Niles Shepard ..from teens to 20's? I' am not able to find any plates on the motor with any info.
 
Ajax:

I'll go with Niles-Shepard for the hoist and powered trolley, and possibly Cleveland Tramrail for the monorail system. Teens to the '20's would be my estimate of time when the monorail crane system was built. I would not worry about who built the crane unless you are intending to use it and need it inspected/serviced. A lot of old machinery like your monorail crane collects a heavy coating of oil and dust/dirt. Up in the overhead of a factory or warehouse, with the kind of lubrication and lubricants used on old cranes, and the lack of easy access for maintenance, old cranes and hoists get covered in a heavy coating of oil/grease/wire rope lube/dust and dirt. This gets to be a heavy layer, and it is quite tenacious. Makers names were often cast into the housings of hoists such as the one in your photos. A coating of grunge and bad light can combine to obliterate a maker's name, even if it were cast in raised letters in the main body of a hoist. A name plate is even harder to find, let alone clean up and read. Unless you have a good access platform so you can clean the hoist with a solvent and rags and scrapers, it is not worth risking your life over. A fall protection harness and soft-stop lanyard are cheap life insurance if you go climbing around on that old monorail crane. Before you go poking around that old crane, make sure the power to the crane is OFF. A lot of the older cranes used open buss wires to supply power to the crane motors via spring-loaded contacts which slid (or rolled) along the exposed/energized buss wires. The buss wires paralleled one of the crane runway girders. On a monorail, there is bound to be an exposed set of buss wires, usually three or four (if three phase power, plus a neutral leg). The buss wires will be on insulated standoffs from the monorail beam. If these are still energized and you are up there poking around, you could get a hell of a shock (or worse) if you come into contact with them. 220 3 phase power (as was used in older plants) would be enough to seriously shock you, kill you, or knock you off whatever you were standing (or crawled out) on. Maybe the wires to the crane buss wires are visibly cut or removed. Until you establish that power to the crane's buss wires is dead, do not go climbing and poking around.

BTW: fall protection gear is great. However, if you are up on that crane alone and take a fall, even with the fall protection harness and lanyard on, it is still bad news. No one will be on hand to retrieve you, so you could wind up dangling in your harness for quite some time until help came. I admit to living in the proverbial fool's paradise on that score. I was going out to inspect a bridge, and the other inspector asked me: what is the rescue plan if one of us falls off the iron ? We both had harnesses and lanyards, but no means of retrieval if one of us took a fall. He had me there. It was something I'd never thought of. It's a good idea to play it safe and assume nothing with an old electrically powered crane. Buss wires could still be hot, and the danger of taking a fall off that crane is very real. Dusty or oil surfaces, old wooden access ladders, and a plant that may have been closed and neglected for years all add up to hazards to think about. Wiring changes are made in buildings, particularly industrial plants, over the years. Breaker panels and feeders get removed and relocated, and wiring becomes something that only the guy who wired it knows. Unless you can identify the breaker or disconnect switch "on the floor" for that crane, and verify it is opened, or unless the power to the whole building is turned off at the service panel, you have to assume the crane's buss wires are hot.

As I get older, I realize the laid back working conditions of 40+ years ago were OK for the times, but there is a reason we got to taking well defined safety precautions. I saw workplace accidents, and saw one young boilermaker apprentice fall to his death. A fall protection harness with a lanyard properly tied off to the powerhouse steel would have saved him. I also saw one man after he'd taken a fall and lived to tell about it, saved by his harness and lanyard- tied off to a system I'd designed. Old overhead cranes are a messy, dirty proposition, and climbing around them requires a higher degree of care.
 








 
Back
Top