Ramsey Transfer

The Ramsey Car Transfer Apparatus by which cars are transferred between railroads of different gauges, or trucks removed or placed for repairing purposes without raising the car body, is a device and patent of R. H. Ramsey, Philadelphia, and is now in successful operation between a number of roads. It is used at Cincinnati between the Cincinnati Southern (5-foot gauge) and the Cincinnati, Indianapolis and Chicago Railroad (4 feet 8-1/2-inch gauge). Cars have been transferred at the rate of ninety seconds per car. Ordinarily, four men can transfer from twenty to thirty cars per hour.

Several of the transfers are constructed upon a general grade of from forty to fifty feet to the mile, and are operated entirely by gravity. Broad and narrow gauge cars pass over the apparatus alternately, each car connecting with the trucks left by the car in advance, and run to their respective sidings below, with no other motive power than gravity and without the use of skilled labor.

The principle of the apparatus is simple. It consists of a pit about twenty inches deep, with rails of both gauges centrally located, and on each side a narrow track built upon the walls of the pit, bearing trucks, called transfer-trucks, which run under the sills of the car body and support it while being transferred. Cross-bars, resting on the transfer-trucks, are used to support narrow car bodies. The trucks of a different gauge are run in the depression previous to the arrival of the car, or left there by the car in advance, and by passing the car body over on the side tracks, it becomes disconnected with its trucks at the first of the incline and connects with the trucks of a different gauge at the opposite incline.

Where a number of cars of one gauge require transferring, the trucks for that number, or part thereof, are placed in the pit (this can be done before the train arrives), after which the car bodies pass over the apparatus, each car leaving its trucks at the first incline and taking from the opposite incline the trucks of a different gauge. Trucks are removed from the depression by turntable or switch to sidings adapted to the location.

There is a contrivance in constant use at Bell's Gap, near Altoona, Pennsylvania, where the bodies of coal cars are transferred from the 3 ft. 6in. to the standard 4 ft. 8-1/2in., and vice versa, by means of a pit with an incline in it at each end laid with the two gauges. On the top of the pit are laid two rails of a wide gauge, which carry the wheels of the bogies supporting the body of the car, which is pushed along the pit, and in passing along the one set of bogies fall away from the centre-pins, and the other set being ready at the other end of the pit, are attached to the centre-pins as the car leaves the pit, so that by this means the bogies only are changed in a very short time - under five minutes.

Although there are several patents issued in England and America for this purpose, the principle is not in practical working. The Ramsey Carbody Transfer, constructed by the Bell's Gap Railroad Company in the spring of 1881, has been in successful operation since that period, transferring daily an average of fifty bodies by hand. The Transfer in on a grade of 1 in 100, worked by gravity, and the maximum capacity is 100 tons daily, costing per ton for transferring five cents per ton.

Denver & Rio Grande had a transfer crane for swapping trucks in Pueblo, for the benefit of the Santa Fe. Once the main line from Pueblo to Denver was standard gauged this practice was abandoned. They also had jointly-used Ramsey Transfers in Salt Lake City and Ogden, shared with the Union Pacific who also owned the narrow gauge Utah & Northern and Utah Western. Recall that in the 1880s the D&RG purchased an entire class of reefers that were designed for truck swapping in Ogden to travel over the Central Pacific. Newspaper articles indicate that a lot of standard gauge traffic was simply truck-swapped for the trip across the D&RGW/D&RG mainline until the RGW standard gauged in 1890. The Salt Lake City Ramsey Transfer was not removed until 1902, because the RGW owned the narrow gauge Utah Central to Park City and the UP didn't standard gauge its Stockton branch (Utah Western) until that year.

For about two decades hundreds of Ramsey Transfer devices and transfer cranes operated across the United States wherever a narrow gauge and standard gauge line met. These were mostly lost when the narrow gauge lines were abandoned or standard gauged by the early 20th century, and it became apparent that interchange traffic was not common enough to warrant such an expensive piece of machinery.

The newly established junction caused Pocatello to become the operating center of the Union Pacific's subsidiaries in the area. The narrow gauge into the Montana mining region proved successful beyond anyone's expectations, but the traffic was now typically transshipped to standard gauge cars at Pocatello, rather than sent on to Ogden. The Union Pacific installed a Ramsey Transfer so as to move standard gauge cars north. The UP sent about 100 narrow gauge gondolas from its South Park Line to move coal from Wyoming to Butte via the Ramsey Transfer. This arrangement, as usual, proved a bottleneck. About 750 tons of freight were transshipped per day in November 1885. Plans for standard gauging the line north of Pocatello were made about that time. As on other narrow gauges, bridges were widened and standard gauge ties installed. The Union Pacific was no longer interested in destinations north of Butte, and arranged with the Northern Pacific to turn the line from Butte to Garrison over to a jointly owned subsidiary, the Montana Union Railway, on August 1, 1886. The Montana Union Railway was converted to standard gauge immediately and made part of the Northern Pacific's alternate main line via Butte. The Union Pacific retained trackage rights from Silver Bow into Butte even after the track was turned over to the Northern Pacific's exclusive ownership in 1898. (ed. note: UP leased the line to NP for 999 years, and still retains ownership today.)