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.