Lidgerwood

For the town in North Dakota, see Lidgerwood, North Dakota.

Lidgerwood was a historic American engineering company famous for its boilers, winches, scrapers, hoists and cranes,^[1] particularly ones that helped build the Panama Canal.^[2][3] They later built logging yarders and aerial tramways, cable cars or ropeways.^[4]

Lidgerwood steering engine

Lidgerwood winches had at least two specific railroad maintenance uses, and were used by railroad customers to move railroad freight cars into position for loading and unloading (and to move other cars out of the way). As the successor company is still in business it is probable that they continue to be used in the railroad industry for moving cars through current (2013) times.

Railroad wheels need to have a specific profile. As the profile wears into degraded shapes their performance becomes irregular and eventually unsafe. Most wheels are re-profiled using some variation of a wheel lathe or milling machine; but it is impractical to position steam locomotives over a lathe or to remove the wheels for re-profiling (although shop lathes do re-profile dis-mounted drive wheels when the locomotive is already disassembled). Instead, a winch – known colloquially as "The Lidgerwood" on some railroads – would move the locomotive while cutting heads were mounted on brake shoe brackets and forced against the wheels. As the locomotive moved against the cutting heads, its wheels were cut back to a desirable profile. In a locomotive maintenance facility of the steam engine era (until, generally, the mid-1950s in the US) the place where this was done was sometimes known as the "Lidgerwood Track".

Maintenance of a railroad embankment may require material (soil, rock, etc.) to be moved from where it is deposited by erosion near the track to a place where the embankment has been eroded away, or a railroad may need to simply widen the cut and fill sections. One method to do this was to mount a winch on one flat car (colloquially known as the Lidgerwood Car and in some cases labeled as such) with a line connected to a plow that was configured to slide along the decks of many flat cars. Soil material was shoveled (manually or by power equipment) onto the flat cars then the train of flat cars was moved to where the material was to be unloaded and the plow was pulled over the decks, forcing the material laterally off the flat cars where it fell to the embankment.^[5]

Notes and references

1. Fletcher, Sherry; Carpenter, Cindy (2015). Elephant Butte Dam. Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing. p. 48. ISBN 978-1-4671-3332-6.
2. McCullough, David G. (1977). The path between the seas: The creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914. New York: Simon and Schuster. pp. 497–498. ISBN 978-0-671-22563-6.
3. Bennet, Ira E. (1915). History of the Panama Canal: Its construction and builders. Washington, D.C.: Historical Publishing Company. p. 358. OCLC 859690.
4. The Lidgerwood Cableway: A Hoisting and Conveying Device. Lidgerwood Manufacturing Company. 1900.
5. Haskin, Frederic Jennings (January 9, 2013). "The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Panama Canal, Illustrated by Ernest Hallen". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved December 11, 2022. Arriving near the scene of the dump, another engine, having in front of it a huge horizontal steam windlass mounted on a flat car, was hooked on the rear end of the train. Then the locomotive which had brought the train to the dump was uncoupled and moved away, and in its stead there was attached an empty flat car, on which there was a huge plow. A long wire cable was stretched from the big windlass at the other end of the train and attached to this plow. As the drum of the windlass began to turn it gradually drew the plow forward over the 21 cars, plowing the material off as it went forward. The cars were equipped with a high sideboard on one side and had none at all on the other. A flat surface over which the plow could pass from car to car was made by hinging a heavy piece of sheet steel to the front end of each car and allowing it to cover the break between that car and the next, thus affording a practically continuous car floor over 800 feet long. The operation of unloading 400 yards of material with this plow seldom required more than 10 minutes.