Ok here are all the construction photos we have.  Too bad we don't have photos to when it was completed, but it is still cool to see up to steel erection.  It is interesting how every or almost every piece of heavy machinery had to be run on rails.  A set of tracks had to be run wherever they planned to use the equipment.

Enjoy.

 

Holy Amazing Batman!  :clap: :clap:

Wow, thanks!

I'd kill or mame to have that Weideman Building still in existance next to the Bingham.

Wow, those are incredible!  Wish we could un-demo that cool building just to the north of the Bingham though.

I'd kill or mame to have that Weideman Building still in existance next to the Bingham.

I'd pay you (off the books of course) to do it!

I'd kill or mame to have that Weideman Building still in existance next to the Bingham.

 

I hear ya  :cry:

Wow. Those are wet-dream material!

 

It looks like they managed all the rail access by using track panels, preassembled sections of rail and ties that they unloaded from railcars with a crane and set into place. That's the fastest way to get track in service, and it's still used for most emergency repair to derailments, and for making quick changes to rail alignment.

 

They built all those concrete forms from timber, labor-intensive and hard labor at that, and although the girders would have been fabricated off-site and railed in, the building skeleton probably was field-riveted using hot rivets. Rivets were heated cherry-red in a furnace and then swaged into place using a pneumatic hammer. They contracted as they cooled to the temperature of the surrounding steel, drawing the joint extremely tight.

 

The dramatic part of hot-riveting was how they got the rivets to the point of assembly; they couldn't move the furnace from one joint to another, so the furnace tender extracted the rivets from the furnace one-by-one using tongs and threw them to a man thirty or forty feet or more away, who caught them in a bucket and immediately slipped them into aligned holes in the girders to be joined, using tongs. He backed up the rivet head while another man used a pneumatic hammer to spread and shape the other end. Strenuous, dangerous work, and it required speed and coordination. Drop very many rivets, and you're fired. On the spot.

 

Sometimes when I look at those old construction photos, I marvel that anyone survived those jobs. There was no OSHA or anything like it, no harnesses or other safety gear, and in a lot of cases, not even a union to look after the interests of the workers.

Thanks Rob, reminds me of only one thing!

 

Very intriguing construction photos and a great finish!

Awesome set!!!! The tracks at the bottom of the hill don't look like much but that was the northernmost piece of the Erie Railroad that ran through Solon to Youngstown where the traffic split -- on the Erie mainline across New York state's Southern Tier (via Elmira & Binghamton) to Hoboken, NJ. The other branch of traffic went over the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie rails to Pittsburgh. Today, the tracks are gone east of Solon.

 

Back to the construction pics. This is my favorite of the bunch...