Ding, Ding, Ding Went the Bell

DC Transit #1470 has not moved under its own power in more than forty years. Given that it drew its power from overhead wires and a trolley pole, this isn't terribly surprising. In 1985, the Roanoke River overflowed its banks in what the area still infamously remembers as "The Flood of `85."* Directly alongside that river was the Virginia Museum of Transportation, located then in Roanoke's Wasena Park. #1470 was likely completely submerged. The water level rose as high as the rafters of the old museum building, and the trolley certainly wasn't that tall, so we're making the inference. We don't know for sure. In any event, the wheels were underwater for days. Now we skip ahead 22 years as we try to move DC Transit #1470 again.

The idea was simple -- we would pick up the street car, pull out the rails, and set it back down on the other set of rails underneath. If we had actually done this, we might have been alright. However, with the Zoo Choo desperate for space given its rather commodious turning radius, we opted to move #1470 a little more to the east to give the train some clearance. This was the rub.

We're estimating the weight of our street car to be in the neighborhood of 30,000 pounds. While that was within the lifting capacity of Allegheny Construction's big crane, it was not within its capacity due to the angle by which the crane was forced to operate (there are some messy physics involved that I won't bother going into). So the new plan was to lift the front end of the trolley with the crane, and pull it forward using a large tow truck (services generously donated by the Commonwealth Coach & Trolley Museum) until it had cleared its upper rails and the front wheels could be set down on the lower rails. This part went [relatively] smoothly. Now we get to the ugly part.

Next we would lift the rear end of the trolley, and drag the whole thing forward some more with the wrecker until those rear wheels cleared the upper rails to be set down level with the rest of the car. Remember how I told you that those wheels had been underwater for days? Well, it seems they never got cleaned up, and the wheels that carried that street car from Alexandria to Glen Echo every day for years refused to let it move the first foot forward today.

Enter: The Tow Truck

By this point, our one-hour moving project had already ballooned up to the three-hour mark. It was decided that a fair lead could be rigged (since the tow truck couldn't maneuver in the tight space to be directly in front of the trolley) to the side of the tow truck, beneath the crane, in front of the street car. The resultant system of pulleys more closely resembled a Rube Goldberg device than a wench.

Picture this: the tow truck sits to the right and about a car length forward of the trolley. The line comes from the tow truck, immediately out to the left (toward the street car), through a pulley fastened by a chain to the rails themselves, to the front of #1470. We created a Tetris piece out of steel cable. Now to engage the wench, pull the trolley forward, and set its rear-end down.

At this time, I'd like to let you know about a new exhibit at your Virginia Museum of Transportation. This museum is now home to the only combination narrow gauge-standard gauge rails on earth.

Rather than pull the trolley forward, the force of the wench and the resistance of the street car joined to bend the steel rails in toward each other, pigeon-toe style. Time for another new plan.

The distance the car needed to move forward was only about three feet. It had been pulled the rest of the way earlier with its front wheels in the air. The daredevils with Allegheny Construction lowered the rear end of the trolley onto blocks they'd put on the lower rails, forward of the upper rails. Then it was just a matter of shoving the upper rail segment out of the way, pulling the blocks out from under the street car, and lowering it finally down to the earth.

And so it was. After five hours, our street car had moved twenty feet forward, and two feet straight down. In the process, we rendered useless a pair of steel rails, dug massive holes in our playground from the tow truck's path, and cost Allegheny Construction about twenty man-hours in donated time and services.

Why settle for the easy way, when the very hard, destructive way will do?

*Every small community refers to natural disasters in this way. It's quaint, which is another way of saying that no one understands it, but it seems charming, anyway.