MODEL FEATURES:

• Rotating boom
• Boom raises and lowers
• Blocks raise and lower
• Flat car with boom support arms
• Fully-assembled and ready to run out of the box
• Highly-detailed, injection-molded body
• Painted and printed for realistic decoration
• Weighted for trouble free operation
• Trucks with machined metal wheels and RP25 contours operate on all popular brands of track
• Body mounted McHenry operating scale knuckle couplers
• Window packaging for easy viewing plus interior plastic blister safely holds the model for convenient storage
• Replacement parts available
• Minimum radius: 18”

PROTOTYPE AND BACKGROUND INFO:

The first railroad cranes relied on locomotives for positioning around the work site. Some big cranes required water tenders to power their steam boilers to operate and rotate the boom. Many of these cranes lasted into the late 1970s and 1980s before being converted to diesel. Some cranes were constructed as diesel towards the end of the steam era. Standard pulling operations for a 200 ton crane required at least 5 idler cars between the locomotive and the crane when in transit from one location to another. The reason was for more braking power as these cranes were often just as heavy, or perhaps heavier, than a single locomotive of the time.