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45 ton Ransomes Crane


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9 minutes ago, Enterprisingwestern said:

 

Presumably the chimney couldn't be lifted anyway when working under OHLE as the knitting would get in the way?

 

Mike.

I think there'd be more than just the chimney causing trouble if you tried to use a crane under OHLE (as opposed to just running it, when the chimney would be lowered anyway) .:jester:

Edited by Dunsignalling
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22 hours ago, craneman said:

That is a question I cannot answer, I am afraid, you'll have to wait until we get a review sample.  It is not easy to tell for sure which cranes ever had lifting gear (it is likely that the SR and the LNER did, not the GW) and the lengths of the chimneys also varied from early on. Almost all the cranes that had lifting gear lost it fairly quickly. The only crane which seems to have retained a long chimney with lifting gear for any length of time is the Gorton crane, which is the one modelled in the photo which prompted this discussion.

 

Generally speaking the chimneys were seldom used on the 45-tonners, since they are heavy to lift into position and tend to impair rather than improve the drafting of the boiler (the Gorton crane, which seems to have retained the ridiculous long chimney longer than any other, had its exhaust modified to to provide forced drafting, the only UK breakdown crane ever to be so modified, probably to allow steam generation with the chimney erected).

 

I have just had a trawl though my R&R 45-tonner photo collection of over a hundred photos of the cranes throughout their operating careers, and in only about 2% of those showing them working are the chimneys being used at all.  Apart from the Gorton crane, the only photos showing cranes with lifting gear still fitted actually don't have chimneys fitted at all - just the lifting gear. I cannot find a single photo of a crane with lifting gear with the chimney raised, and if fact this has hindered Bachmann's representation of the lifting gear since we simply don't know  what it looked like in the "up" position.  The lifting gear was used only in conjunction with the original extremely long chimneys (although some cranes retained the gear when the long chimneys were cut down to an intermediate length), never with the short ones. It is probably therefore more accurate to pose your model with the chimney down than up. 


It should be understood that it really was very rare indeed for the chimneys on these cranes to be used at all, they don't really do anything useful, and the boiler steams better without them. They are also heavy and awkward to raise (without the lifting gear you have to climb on the cab roof and heave them into position, and it is both difficult and dangerous). I have never bothered with this aggro when operating a 45-tonner (and the back of you neck still gets filthy when driving one whether the chimney is up or down). 

Hi Craneman,

 

I have experience of using the Cravens Brothers crane RS1013/50 at the ELR some years back. This particular crane never had a chimney fitted and steamed just fine.

It is my guess that the chimneys on mist cranes helped keep smoke out of the cab area as much as assisting draught raising steam from cold.

 

Gibbo.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I did hope they would have produced the early red livery more suitable for the 60s steam era and

would have thought a better seller may be later I hope, yes black ones were still around then

as shown in the picture nice to see a class 20 on there, just prefer the early lined out red.

Edited by paul 27
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None of the R&R 45-tonners ever carried "lined out red" livery while in service with BR. The two Southern cranes , the Midland (ex-GW) crane, and the two ex-LNER cranes carried plain red for a while, but the only one ever to be lined out in red is S1561 in its current preservation guise at the Swanage Railway.

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The red crane is RS1097/45 (ex-GWR 17) and the livery is historically accurate for June 1977. It is extremely difficult to say with certainty when cranes were repainted, since no records exist and one has to work off available photographs (most of which are monochrome) but I can say with confidence that this crane was still in its black livery (essentially the same as applied by the GWR after the war) on 1st February 1969.

 

Based on the condition of the paintwork and the degree of weathering in June '77, I would think it was repainted from black to red sometime around 1974.

 

The lined red livery you referred to was the livery carried by the so-called "modernisation plan" 75-ton and 30-ton cranes ordered in November 1959 after the publication of the “Memorandum on Breakdown Cranes for Development Programme” in July 1958 and March 1959. One of the issues which had vexed the "Ad-Hoc Committee", set up in 1953 to investigate ways to improve breakdown working, was that of recruiting staff into breakdown gangs and the maintenance of morale in the gangs, both aspects which had become problematic. The Ad-Hoc Committee's solution to these two issues was to recommend that breakdown cranes and vans should be painted in a distinctive red livery with straw lining, and this was mandated by General Instruction issued in July 1959. The 75- and 30-ton cranes were the only cranes to be delivered from new in this livery. Despite the General Instruction, the repainting of other cranes, which were all black at the time, was undertaken in a piecemeal and unhurried way, and many cranes never received red livery at all, and very few of those repainted received the mandated straw lining. The Western Region, for example, never painted any of its cranes red, because the correct GWR colour for a crane was black and that was the Swindon way!

 

More info on this aspect can be found on the BDCA website, specifically http://bdca.org.uk/modernisation.html

Edited by craneman
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Perhaps a point of comparison, but the new DCC-controlled steam crane from Trix has an RRP of just under a 1000 pounds, although it can be got for

under 900 at the moment:

 

https://www.aandhmodels.co.uk/23057-db-ardelt-57t-steam-crane-dcc-sound-51895-p.asp

 

Even with all the DCC functionality, you still have to manually lower the support jacks.

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On 05/10/2019 at 00:25, craneman said:

The red crane is RS1097/45 (ex-GWR 17) and the livery is historically accurate for June 1977.

 

Excuse me if this has been mentioned before but where was RS1097/45 located to when in red livery?

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4 hours ago, Barry Ten said:

Perhaps a point of comparison, but the new DCC-controlled steam crane from Trix has an RRP of just under a 1000 pounds, although it can be got for

under 900 at the moment:

 

https://www.aandhmodels.co.uk/23057-db-ardelt-57t-steam-crane-dcc-sound-51895-p.asp

 

Even with all the DCC functionality, you still have to manually lower the support jacks.

 

 

It is also a rather crude model (and I think based on fairly old tooling, though I may be wrong on this) and not a patch on the DCC "Goliath" offered some years back by Marklin and Trix.

 

When talking of DCC and cranes, it is also worth bearing in mind, as I pointed out many pages ago in this thread, that any British outline steam breakdown crane is inherently far, far more difficult to motorise than most European and US outline equivalents since no British steam BDC ever had an enclosed cab. All the HO-scale DCC cranes produced to date have had fully-enclosed machinery spaces which allow several motors to be hidden. You simply cannot practically fit the motors you would need (a minimum of two, assuming travel and slew are fitted into the carriage) into the boiler, and even if you could you then have the problem of transferring drive from the motors to the crane motion in a realistic and completely exposed way.

 

The level of detail on the Bachmann crane far eclipses that of the Trix Ardelt crane.

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10 minutes ago, bubbles2 said:

 

Excuse me if this has been mentioned before but where was RS1097/45 located to when in red livery?

 

Saltley, Willesden, Longsight, and Crewe, although it is not known if it was painted at Saltley shortly before leaving for Willesden, or painted at Willesden almost immediately on arrival (it was black and at Saltley in 1969, and red and at Willesden by 1977).

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  • 2 weeks later...
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On 10/10/2019 at 11:29, Barry Ten said:

Perhaps a point of comparison, but the new DCC-controlled steam crane from Trix has an RRP of just under a 1000 pounds, although it can be got for

under 900 at the moment:

 

https://www.aandhmodels.co.uk/23057-db-ardelt-57t-steam-crane-dcc-sound-51895-p.asp

 

Even with all the DCC functionality, you still have to manually lower the support jacks.

Impressive but I think this vindicates Bachmanns decision to make a non working (albeit pose able) model both on price grounds but also on realism. 

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14 minutes ago, MikeParkin65 said:

Impressive but I think this vindicates Bachmanns decision to make a non working (albeit pose able) model both on price grounds but also on realism. 

 

Yes, that was pretty much my point -  a working model is going to cost close to 1000 pounds, which is presumably far more than the UK market could tolerate.

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