Old Hand Pump

by Gary Keesler

Title

Old Hand Pump

Artist

Gary Keesler

Medium

Photograph - Digital Art Photography

Description

Old Hand Pump RR Car at the National Historic Site Scranton, Pennsylvania.

A handcar also known as a pump trolley, pump car, jigger, Kalamazoo, or draisine is a railroad car powered by its passengers.

It is mostly used as a maintenance of way or mining car, but it was also used for passenger service in some cases.

A typical design consists of an arm, called the walking beam, that pivots, seesaw-like, on a base, which the passengers alternately push down and pull up to move the car.

It is not clear who invented the handcar. It is likely that machinists in individual railroad shops began to build them to their own design.

Many of the earliest ones operated by turning large cranks. It is likely that the pump handcar, with a reciprocating walking beam, came later.

While there are hundreds of US patents pertaining to details of handcars, probably the primary designs of mechanisms for powering handcars were in such common use that they were not patent-able when companies started to manufacture handcars for sale to the railroads.

Handcars were critical to the operation of railroads during a time when railroads were essential forms of transportation in America, from about 1850 to 1910.

There may have been handcars as early as the late 1840's but they were quite common during the American Civil War.

They were a very important tool in the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. There were many thousands of them built.

They were commonly assigned to a "section" of track, the section being between about 6 to 10 miles long, depending upon the traffic and speed experienced on the section.

Each section would have a section crew that would maintain that piece of track.

Each section usually had a section house which was used to store tools and the section's handcar.

Roughly 130,000 miles of track had been constructed in American by 1900.

Consider that there was a handcar for every ten miles of that track. That would mean there were 13,000 handcars and that is a minimum.

Motor section cars began to appear in the very early 1900"s, or a few years earlier.

They quickly replaced handcars. Those handcars that were not scrapped as part of the World War One, were probably scrapped for World War Two.

It is not clear how many handcars survived. They can be found in railroad museums and some are in private hands.

Handcars have been normally used by railway service personnel (also known as a Gandy dancer) for railroad inspection and maintenance.

Because of their low weight and small size, they can be put on and taken off the rails at any place, allowing trains to pass.

Handcars have since been replaced by self-propelled vehicles that do not require the use of manual power, instead relying on internal combustion engines or electricity to move the vehicle.

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Uploaded

August 27th, 2014

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