Innovative uses of bobcats

andrew@operationaldynamics.com (Andrew Cowie) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 08:38:00 GMT

Ordinarily Rail car movers (aka HiRail trucks) are either enormous ugly yellow painted beasts (which are inevitably maintenance nightmares) or are glorified pickup trucks (which, while great for zooming around to fix a remote signal, that haven’t much hope of actually moving anything). This week, though, I came across an unusual approach to dealing with moving small numbers of cars in an private industrial rail yard that might do the trick. A Canadian company called Brandt Equipment markets a vehicle called the “Rail Yard Boss” which is nothing but a John Deere front loader adapted with rail wheels and a coupler. Photos from their website (I don’t live where there is so much grain, you know?):

The interesting part is that it uses its hoist to transfer some of the weight from the car its pushing to itself, thereby increasing the friction between its wheels and the track, improving its traction as a result. That’s smart.

The advantage over a real switcher, of course, is that it can just up the steel wheels, pivot, and drive out of the way.

On the other hand, given that this thing can only push a max of 5 loaded cars, you’ll probably end up needing a real switcher sooner or later anyway (and what yard doesn’t have a spur as a switching lead to get things out of the way?). Still though, pretty neat.

AfC