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Big fork lift? If you want to call it that


B MACK

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Yes they are pretty cool to watch do their job. The wagners always seemed to be broke down a lot. But those diesel / electric le tournea's  didn't have too much trouble.    There is a le tournea dump truck at the mining museum in Butte. I'll look in my albums for a pict of it.

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  • 4 months later...

Westvaco used similar machines at Covington and on the local wood yards, but they were FWDs. I remember when "Chief", the switch truck driver, dropped a load of chips at the Dillwyn wood yard one time. He didn't put any wood under the landing gear legs and when he pulled out from under it it just sunk until the nose of the trailer was almost on the ground. They brought the FWD out there and slid the forks under the front of the van and it just picked it up so effortlessly it was amazing. I've seen them run the forks right through the frame rails of a log trailer in Covington- now it wasn't a new Pitts, it was like a converted, already-worn-out-old-flatbed-log trailer, but those machines just had awesome power!   

Producer of poorly photo-chopped pictures since 1999.

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And, one time a Midway Trucking (out of Brookneal, Va.) IH was waiting in line to get unloaded at the Westvaco paper mill in Covington. He was parked along the road where the trucks were always lined up, along side the rail road tracks. Trucks were backed up a little because they had a bunch of train cars to unload too. One of the FWDs came over to grab the wood off of a train car- they would pick up the whole stack,one lift- and when they slide the forks under the wood, they would lower those curved prongs over it to clamp it all together. And when the operator closed those curved forks they caught the cab of the Midway truck, ripping almost half of it off- good thing nobody was riding with him! The operator couldn't see the truck at all, because it was on the other side of a train car. 

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Producer of poorly photo-chopped pictures since 1999.

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  • 6 years later...

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