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So the other day on my way home to visit my parents I spotted this neat machine. Out here we call them a Drott as these excavators were first made by the Drott Company which as you probably know was bought by Case only thing is usually these are usually mounted on a wheeled chassis with the engine in the wheeled chassis part. Well this one is owned by the City of Winnipeg and use to be used to pull old railroad ties out that were rotten or broken. But it is more often used these days for mowing the brush and grass in the ditches and along the rail line. The chassis it sits on now was made in the Greater Winnipeg Water District's shops so it run on train tracks instead of it's own tracks. The boom and stick came from a worn out 'wheeled' version of the machine as it's better configured for pulling ties out. And the mower is much like Ian's mower on his tractor except it's got a hydraulic motor on it and no 3-point hitch.
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i love seeing machinery getting recycled and given a new life and purpose!! -
I've got a video to accompany this one it's just driving down the track but it's kinda neat. I couldn't get close while it was operating due to the obvious danger of the mower.Comment
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That looks like a rickety old rail track
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As Garry commented , Is it an optical illussion or are thoses tracks seriously buckled .
I know the heat here can do strange things to tracks.Comment
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This was filmed back in the 80s. The train is still running today . The Gulflander
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvHlR...eature=relatedComment
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It's just an illusion guys the rails are relatively flat and straight. The GWWD actually has a lot of importance to the City of Winnipeg as the city doesn't get it's drinking water from the Red or the Assinboine River as the quality of the water was found to be too muddy for human consumption at the turn of the century. So a cleaner source of water was found at the Manitoba/Ontario border at Shoal Lake which is part of the Lake of the Woods watershed. So in order to pipe it to Winnipeg about a 102 miles east a concrete aquaduct was built and since Winnipeg is at a lower elevation than Shoal Lake the water is able to flow by gravity. So in order to build the aquaduct a railroad was built that paralleled it and supplied whatever was needed to build as there were few if any roads at the time and trucks were a thing of the future. lol Today the railroad doesn't get a whole lot of use though in the past up until the early nineties it was used to haul gravel for what is now Lafarge Canada's pre-cast concrete plant in the St. Boniface Industrial Park. Most trains that go along the line are for aquaduct maintenance and repair as well for maintaining the intake facilities and hauling chlorine and chemical cars from the new treatment plant. As well the city has special tank cars for hauling sewage from near the intake facility from an Indian Reserve in order to keep them from contaminating the lake.
http://winnipeg.ca/waterandwaste/dept/railway.stm
Interesting link you posted Ian the GWWD had a Mack motor car that was similar to the one in that movie.Comment
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