Thursday, October 16, 2008

Hammer

Are you familiar with hammers of this type? What I know is that they were used by inspectors on the Northern Pacific Railway at Northtown Yards in Minneapolis into the 1960s. It was made by the blacksmith at Northtown. This hammer was my father's. I should somewhere have a smaller version that my father had the blacksmith make for me when I was a little kid. The genius of the hammer: the inspector could use the claw to remove the tack from a card on the side of a boxcar, place a new card, then, (using the hammer upside down with the tack secure in the claw) replace the tack without ever touching it. I saw this done the summer of 1961 when I worked on the section crew at Northtown. Was this tool a standard around the railroad world or restricted to one or a few places and railroads?

No comments: