Who needs a turntable?

Browsing thru a bunch of video's on youtube and came across this video. At first i thought they were just going onto a turntable, then bam something you would never think to see.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYWCbz2Q ... re=related

that may be useful to recover from minor derailments and for shop work in tight places

That was cool. When I was in the track department some of the smaller on track machinery could be turned like that. Spike machines etc.

GN 599 wrote:That was cool. When I was in the track department some of the smaller on track machinery could be turned like that. Spike machines etc.

I beleve that it is now standered for most small on track mow equipment to have a small round foot that lifts the machine up so that it can be turned around. It dose seem like I had seen this on some outher type of equipment but can't rember what it was off hand.

Gasoline-powered track buses (and maybe some similar equipment) on the Hetch-Hetchy Railroad had those feet for turning around back in the 1930s or so. The RR ran up to the Hetch-Hetchy dam and reservoir; it was built and run by the city of San Francisco to build the dam. After the second phase was built, the RR was abandoned and mostly removed (early 1950s, I think). There's pictures of the gas equipment (and their steam locomotives with cars) in the book _Hetch-Hetchy and its Dam Railroad_, whose author I forget. I think I remember the book saying that one of the reasons they used the gasoline buses so much in the last decade or so of operations was that they could turn them without turntables, but I may just be guessing that.