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| Steel Plant Museum of Western New York posted An image of a blast furnace transfer car at the Republic Steel Buffalo Plant. |
Another view of a transfer car on the high-line. It appears that they could also dump directly from railroad hopper cars into the storage bins.
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| Steel Plant Museum of Western New York posted An image of the blast furnaces at the Republic Steel Buffalo Plant in 1978. |
I found an explanation that a larry is a self-propelled car for transferring materials.
Please follow this link to a photo. It shows that they could be quite big. robertjohndavis called those big cars "charging larries." and Mike Piersa explains. [rypn]
The cars still exist, and might run again. The cars are seven foot, ten and a half inch gauge. In company literature, they are referred to as ore transfer cars and there are two types, side dump and bottom dump. The side dump cars were used near the ore bridges, underneath the furthest working position of the bucket, on tracks running parallel to the bridge tracks (the 574 foot long bridges, one of which survives, ran on standard gauge tracks 247 feet away from each other, from the center of each track). The other cars were bottom dump cars (pictured at the link on the 1st post) that took loads of iron pellets on the highline (also referred to as the Hoover-Mason trestle for its designers), and dumped them into the Hoover-Mason system of stock bins. The bins fed Atlas Car & Manufacturing Company built electric (trolley) powered scale cars that moved, weighed, and dropped the material into skip buckets that were hoisted to the top of the blast furnaces. All of these items still exist.The broad gauge transfer cars are parked atop the trestle and can be seen from one spot on Daly Avenue between buildings just west of the Minsi Trail Bridge. The sidewalk on the bridge itself also offers views of the equipment. Under Bethlehem Steel, who originally planned the redevelopment of the historic steel mill, the transfer cars were intended to be restored to transport passengers from a parking area to the retail/entertainment/museum area of BethWorks. The new owners, BethWorks Now, intend to preserve the trestle as it is in very good condition.
We can see at the bottom of this image that at least five of those larries have been preserved at the preserved Bethlehem site.
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| Satellite |
The term seems to have been coined by the coke industry back when they were still using bee hive ovens. Back then, they were not self-propelled. The larries were shoved across the top of the ovens and dumped coal into the ovens.
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| LegacyStation |
In the bottom image of this blog extract, we see that the length of the car was the same as the spacing between the ovens so that multiple ovens could be loaded at the same time.
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| DeBruler |
I found several descriptions of how to make coke, and they all said that a larry car was used to charge the ovens. For example:
This pulverized coal mixture is introduced into coke ovens, or “charged,” by a “larry car.” The larry car is akin to a railcar that moves across a track that runs along the top of a coke oven battery. Each individual oven has a “charging port,” a door with a lid, that is removed when the larry car is positioned above the oven in order for the pulverized coal to be charged. [PaCokeOvens]
And Walthers shows us what a modern coke oven larry looks like. However: "BTW - some people on the above forums (who have worked in steel mills) say that the Walthers HO model doesn't resemble any known prototype..." [CSX_road_slug comment in trains]
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| Walthers |
Note the man in front of the larry car in this photo to provide scale as to how big the car is.
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| Anthony Wheeler posted, cropped to Facebook resolution [Some comments indicate an oven at Burns Harbor can hold 32 metric tons, which is 35.274 US tons. Below are the comments I read during the afternoon of Jan 2.] |
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| Comments on Anthony's post |
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| Thomas Boswell posted Late 1980's view of Gary Works #7 three-meter coke battery. Seen is top side and pusher side. Bi-products dept. In the background. Coal was loaded into the Larry Car shown topside, from the coal bunker, and then the Larry Car would charge the oven through several charging holes. |
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| David Holoweiko posted via Dennis DeBruler |
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| Jordan Harmon commented on David's post above 2024 burns harbor |
Most material transfer applications of larries have been replaced by conveyor belts, but they are still used to charge coke ovens because of the additional functions of unsealing, removing, replacing and resealing the lid. In fact, judging by Anthony's photo, each oven has four lids.
One function of a larry car is to be able to accurately dump its contents. Another function in some applications is to be able to weigh the contents so that it can dump an accurate amount of material. Both of these functions is why a larry was added to the design of Hulett iron ore unloaders. In this diagram
we cans see the larry hanging from inclined rails at the bottom of the gantry.
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| ASME, p11 |
Here I cropped the diagram to get the full available resolution and highlighted the larry in red and a hopper in blue. The rails are inclined because the larry used a rope hoist to pull itself to the right and gravity to pull it to the left.
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| Digitally Zoomed plus Paint |
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| BGSU View underneath 17 ton unloaders |
The travelling bucket would dump its load into the hopper. Since the hopper is on the ship's end of the gantry, this minimized the distance that the bucket had to travel. And it gave a bigger target for the bucket operator to dump into than a railroad ore hopper would provide. The hopper could hold about three bucket loads. The larry operator would then load his car from the hopper, travel over to the correct ore car and deposit the correct amount of ore into the ore car using its on-board scale. Since a railroad charges by the carload, you want to get as much into a car as possible. But you do not want to exceed the rating for the route the ore car will take to its destination. For a long time the max weight was 263k pounds for a 4-axle car. The railroads have been upgrading to the new standard of 286k. I was curious about the implementation of that new standard so I found this CSX map. The red routes still have the 263k max rating. But ore cars are short because ore is dense compared to coal, grain, etc. I wonder if those cars have a lower rate because short cars would allow more weight to be placed on a bridge span.
The Republic Steel Buffalo Plant photo at the top of these notes and the Bethelehem photo show a steel mill design that Sloss Furnaces helped pioneer. Specifically, a high-line would be built on a trestle above several storage bins. Larries would transfer iron ore, coke and limestone from the storage yards to these bins. These larries probably did not have to weigh their product. And there was a tunnel under the storage bins that would allow a larry with a scale to unload a specific amount of material from a storage bin and transfer it to the skip hoist pit. Sloss called this car a scale car. Before the use of skip hoists, a blast furnace was charged with wheelbarrows going up an elevator and being shoved over a bridge to the top of the blast furnace where the contents of the wheelbarrow was tipped into the furnace. I remembered when I attended a tour of the Joliet Iron Works Ruins that the guide said the "bridge" wasn't much more than wood planks. They didn't worry about handrails in the 1800s. And sometimes a worker would fall into the blast furnace. Management didn't care because they only had to walk out to the front gate and pick someone from the throng of men that wanted a job. And there was no worker's comp back then.
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| CSX Map |
The Republic Steel Buffalo Plant photo at the top of these notes and the Bethelehem photo show a steel mill design that Sloss Furnaces helped pioneer. Specifically, a high-line would be built on a trestle above several storage bins. Larries would transfer iron ore, coke and limestone from the storage yards to these bins. These larries probably did not have to weigh their product. And there was a tunnel under the storage bins that would allow a larry with a scale to unload a specific amount of material from a storage bin and transfer it to the skip hoist pit. Sloss called this car a scale car. Before the use of skip hoists, a blast furnace was charged with wheelbarrows going up an elevator and being shoved over a bridge to the top of the blast furnace where the contents of the wheelbarrow was tipped into the furnace. I remembered when I attended a tour of the Joliet Iron Works Ruins that the guide said the "bridge" wasn't much more than wood planks. They didn't worry about handrails in the 1800s. And sometimes a worker would fall into the blast furnace. Management didn't care because they only had to walk out to the front gate and pick someone from the throng of men that wanted a job. And there was no worker's comp back then.
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| DeBruler |
A good view of the larry car in a Hulett.
So I have found four applications of larries in a steel mill:
- Part of a Hulett iron ore unloader's design
- Transferring material from storage yards to storage bins
- Transferring material from storage bins to skip hoists
- Transferring coal to coke ovens
It never occurred to me that conveyor belts were disruptive technologies until I wrote these notes. They not only made the first three applications obsolete, they made Huletts themselves obsolete because ore boats were converted to self-unloaders. They also made ore bridges and skip hoists obsolete.
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