Vintage work crew photos

[Jon]

Mix of loggers with their donkey engines. Washington. 1915-1921.

Largest size images available.

[ranald]

"The Good Ol' Days". I've seen pics of the local bank (where i live now) on skids like that & it would be hitched to a team of draft horses & dragged down town where folk could access in the wet. After the "big wet" it would be dragged back up to it former position. some of my woodworking colleagues remember that but they are reducing in number of late.

[marksbug]

I think I saw that one time on the history channel before it became the everything not true and staged channel. reality my ass. those guys with the donkey knew reality.

[suther51]

Frank S I do believe that the donkey engines did pull them selves along at times. Can't remember where I saw it but did see a series of pictures of an engine pulling its self across a stream. The caption talked about how a sizable head of Steam was built up first. Then mentioned that the operator was fortunate not to have blown the boiler from the temperature shock of the cold stream water. In one of the pictures the engine was mostly obscured by the steam from the water hitting the hot metal. One of my relitives has a book with a title something like Endless Tracks in the Woods. Dont think it was in there but many old time pictures of tracked loging equipment, some steam powered if i remember correct.
Eric

[Ralphxyz]

It would make sense for them to drag themselves except for tipping the steam boiler might not like being tipped.

Ralph

[suther51]

I talked with my cousin last night and it may have been in the book Endless Tracks in the Woods that I saw the sequence of pictures of the donkey engine. My cousin originally had the book but my uncle and his grandson have it now, but apparently there is a section on donkey engines and how they were used in logging. Conversation really got my cousin's juices going! He to is a big fan of machines. According to the book the donkey engines pulled themselves mostly everywhere after they were unloaded from the railroad.
https://oregonencyclopedia.org/artic...W8T_8uQpAadric
Eric

[marksbug]

it would of been eazy to add a set of tractor wheels to it run off the belt/shaft to help push it along too. after it's just a steam tractor without wheels.....hmm 4 wheel drive would of been eazy to!!! but them they would be driving it back to town for coffie everyday....

[Frank S]

Not sure but I think I would have rather used a horse those pentacycles would be fine on smooth paved or hard dirt roads but where would you find a smooth paved road most paved roads of the time were paved with planks or cobble stones and dirt is only hard when it is neither too dry or wet. It would take a lot of leg muscles to go up very much of a grade and hard to hold back going down.
Still the pentacycles would have been much more stable than the 2 wheeled high wheeler's of the time.

[Jon]

New York City Port Authority tunnel police. 1950s.

It looks like we have a new winner in the "Early Days of Speeding and Cultural Innocence" category:

Police officer instructs ostrich carriage to slow down. Los Angeles, California. 1930. Largest image size available:

[ranald]

It looks like we have a new winner in the "Early Days of Speeding and Cultural Innocence" category:

Police officer instructs ostrich carriage to slow down. Los Angeles, California. 1930. Largest image size available:

More recently, this decade, I was delivering spring water in the 19.6 litre bottles to a company called "laminex Industries". While doing my induction, I learnt that if any vehicle went over 8 kph the driver would be expelled "for ever":years before they had had a death on the site caused mostly by speeding over the original 15 kph. Its pretty hard to keep a truck moving at 5 mph=1st gear only. even the large Cat dozers crawled up the mountains of wood chips. Every employee (except office staff) had a pushie either 2 wheeled or trike with a carry basket. One of the guys used to unlock some roller doors for me so I could manually unload the required full bottles to a destination near the water coolers, and I removed the empties: he told me they caught him on his push bike doing 8 kph resulting in a warning to "show cause why he shouldn't be sacked" = no fines, just a last warning.
That took speeding & safety to a whole new level: they had speed cameras everywhere even in the warehouses.