The NY Power Authority, for whom I worked for 32 years, now runs the NY State Canal Corporation. The short version of the story is the governor of NY State decided that to reduce the burden on the taxpayers, the state agencies which were not self-supporting would be attached to the public authorities which are self-supporting. We called it "getting stuck with the dogs".
The Canal Corp was deeded to the NY Power Authority after I retired, and the Power Authority has been trying to "modernize" the Canal Corp. This accounts for the auction. Canal Corp runs canals which have their hub and start just north of Albany, NY (at Waterford, NY), and run to Buffalo, as well as north up to Lake Champlain.
The Canal Corp shops originally had a lot of heavy machine work to maintain parts of the navigational locks as well as their dredges, floating derricks, and tugboats as well as various types of sluice gates and other appurtances on the dams and locks. As time went on, the shops saw less use as the older equipment was phased out or work was outsourced. I recall some years back that Canal Corp was awarding rebuilding of navigational locks to outside contractors. The contractors, in turn, were using local machine shops to make new parts such as cable sheaves and pins for them for some of the old gate hoists. The old lock gates dated to the 1920's and worked by rack and pinion gearing driven by fully enclosed DC motors (which looked like they came out of either a mine locomotive or a streetcar). There were soapstone boards with open "clapper" type contactors, and motor-generator sets to make the DC power for operating the gates. One by one, the old gates have been modernized with hydraulic operators, and provision made to run them in an emergency with a PTO from a tractor. Similarly, a lot of the old floating equipment is gone, and in its place modern equipment such as hydraulic excavator type booms and hydraulic cranes on self-propelled barges (with "Harbormaster" type propulsion using 'modern' diesel engines) is in use. The need to maintain old floating equipment which would require replacing bushings in cable or chain sheaves or re-forging parts for the old dipper dredges and similar is past. While some of the Canal Corp fleet of tugs dates to the turn of the twentieth century, all were dieselized ages ago. Some are on their second generation of diesel power, getting 'Cat diesels in place of the old slow-speed direct-reversing diesels.
If I know my old employer, the Power Authority, they are going thru the Canal Corp like shit thru a goose. Bringing in a consistent system of maintenance resource management software (MRM) and asset management, determining what is needed and what is surplus. Unfortunately, a lot of the corporate thinking in the Power Authority is driven by age of an asset rather than actual condition. A lot of the corporate thinking is also driven by safety concerns. IOW: if a machine tool or piece of heavy equipment is so old it does not have all the latest bells and whistles for safeguards and OSHA mandated requirements, it has to go.
Meanwhile, after 6 1/2 years of "retirement", I was asked if I wanted to come back to work at my old power plant. The role will be as a "mentor", and I was told I would have no specific duties, just be "the old man" to young engineers and apprentice mechanics. Same rate of pay as I retired at, only now there is now deduct for 401K or health insurance benefits and a different tax bracket. When I WAS working full time, we all noticed that corporate, in their finite wisdom, was making no move for "succession planning", and as we retired, no one was being trained to step up to the plate in our steads. Now, a group of us are brought back after retirement.
I asked to work 3 days a week as "retirement" was suiting me just fine otherwise, with plenty of other work going on. I am sure I will get the straight dope as to what is going on at the Canal Corp, as our plant is closest to the Waterford hub. As it were, some of my old buddies at the Power Authority were joking that they ought to have brought me back a few years sooner as I was likely the only one to know what the old equipment at Canal Corp was and how it worked.
My guess as to the fume extractors is they are for welding. Canal maintenance work required a lot of welding, particularly "pad welding" to build up worn teeth, worn cutting edges, worn seating surfaces on some of the flow-control gates. This was "winter work" when the canals were closed to navigation. When the canals are close to navigation, the "pans are pulled"- these are fabricated steel "pans" which form the crest of each dam at most of the locks. The pans are hinged and are raised with chains and locked off. The chains are hoisted by a travelling windlass which runs on rails above the pans on the dam crests. The travelling windlasses run on electricity, and are from the 'teens and 'twenties, unless replaced with something newer. Plenty of winter work once the pans are pulled, and it finds its way into the Canal Corp shops. Not so much machine work, and even less wood work (Canal Corp had quite the woodworking shops with large bandsaws for cutting timbering, planers, and similar).
As an example of how the Power Authority thinks: In 1991, I bought a brand new Powermatic 10" table saw for the powerplant. I ordered it with the Biesemyer fence. It was used for various interior carpentry work as well as for making wooden signs and handrails, packing crates for stuff sent out for repair, and whatnot. Not a great deal of use. Someone in corporate discovered a new table saw with an automatic safety brake triggered by moisture/blood. The saw has some sensor which can detect excess moisture or fluid on the blade and stops the saw by releasing a spring loaded aluminum brakeshoe into the blade while conking out the motor. The saw is made in Taiwan and nowhere near the saw the Powermatic was. We got orders to surplus the Powermatic saw, and off it went to be auctioned. The fact we only occasionally used ANY table saw and the fact the Powermatic was bought new with proper guarding was not even addressed. The word was "it's unsafe and has to go..." I had a hell of a fight to keep our engine lathes and other machine tools as this same line of thinking prevailed. Corporate has lost the capability of realizing that if a person is running a piece of machinery or equipment, they have to take some responsibility for their own safety and the safety of others around them. They want everything to made absolutely safe, automatically so. We had to put "emergency stop" provisions on our machine tools. With VFD drive upgrades, this was not hard to do on some of them, but on others, it still means the machinery has time to coast down and continue doing whatever it was doing to the person who tripped the E-stop.
I am sure Canal Corp, now under the Power Authority's management, is going to be having quite a few auctions of machinery and equipment. There was a nice old "Brown Hoist" railroad steam crane in the Utica, NY yard. A little bitty railroad steam crane as these things go, which was last in steam in January of 1986 (I got to ride it then). It was shoved off the end of the yard tracks into the weeds in the Utica yard and left to set there, overgrown. I think the reasons it was retired then was the operator retired, and the boiler had been derated so many times that the little crane could scarecely get out of its own way. It ran in a cloud of steam from leaking rod packing, and when they tried running it on compressed air, it was so loose that it could not run at all. Since the boiler had asbestos on it, they shoved if off the rails and forgot about it. Along came the Power Authority, and they said the crane had to go. I tried to get it donated to a local railroad historical group, and I hope it happened.