Just watched your video, very enjoyable, and as I worked on the cranes for 3 months as an apprentice electrician in 1979, I thought you may be interested in a couple of comments. What you referred to as the small crane at the 'head', is the service crane. I only ever saw this used to bring up supplies (barrels of diesel mostly, for the generators) from the ground, and never saw it picking anything out of the trollies to be lowered to the ground. The wheels do have brakes, generally used to keep the crane in place while lifting; there is a station at each end of the tracks called 'pin locking' where at the end of the working day, each crane is parked. A hydraulic ram drives a pin horizontally from the crane through a plate sunk into the concrete. At the same time, a large plug on the end of a cable can be manually inserted into a socket trackside to provide 'shore power' so that the crane can turn off the diesel generator which supplies power when the crane is working. When I was working on the cranes, they had the names Samson & Goliath, so the 'Samson' name dates from before 1982. You mentioned the damage to Goliath when it blew along the tracks one Sunday in 1978. This caused the crane to go 'askew' which means there was a 'twist' in the main girders going from side to side. It took more than a year for the crane to go back into service; the 'askew' was never completely eradicated, so the safety system was amended to take account of the non alignment. I was on the cab along with the driver the day it had to go through it's insurance re-certification testing before being entered back into service. The 1050 ton straight lift (840 tons + 25% overload) went without a hitch, but when we tried to travel down the tracks with the 840 ton load, the askew alarm went off (one side of the crane was travelling faster than the other), and the wheels went into emergency stop. While the bottom stopped, 300 odd feet above, the top was still moving, and we found ourselves bouncing around inside the cab, while being deafened by the alarm siren. That was my last time on the crane! I hope you found this interesting. Again, thanks for an enjoyable video.
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