Southern Railway of British Columbia
Rail Link

Trapp Yard

Diesel shop
Mile 14.32 CP Marpole Spur

New Westminster

Andy Cassidy

SRY 122 GP9 mother and 001 slug inside shop. 9/25/2012

1256 (acq. 2012 ex Eurocan Pulp & Paper 1256 nee CN 1256) SW1200RS GMD A1028 12/1956

Sold by J&L Consulting (D) to Pend Oreille Valley RR in Washington state.

Two of four heavy duty jacks (yellow) are part of shop equipment.

Hegenscheidt In-Ground Wheel Truing Machine.

These are unique machines that most railroaders are not familiar with since most shops employ Stanray Wheel Truing Machines. The main difference between the two is that the Stanray machine is a Milling Machine that uses two profiled rotating heads full of cutting inserts to true the wheels that are turned on centres. The Hegenscheidt machine is an actual lathe that cuts steel off the wheels in a continuous strip. The wheelset is positioned over the centre of the machine and basically two drive wheels on each side are raised up to contact and drive the flange of the wheel. The rails either side of the machine are swung out of the way and the machine bed is lowered then moved in to bring the drive rollers up under the wheels. The wheels are held in place through this move by small stationary blocks you can see in the picture if you look closely. When the drive rollers are up and have taken the weight of the unit they are turned on. Then the actual cutters are brought in to true the wheel. It’s all done hydraulically. Once the tread is profiled the weight and drive is moved to the tread of the wheels so the flange can be cut. It’s an art form, let’s just leave it at that!

Stanrays are easy to use and it’s almost impossible to mess up a wheel (but it can be done). The Heg though is a different story, and you can bugger up a wheel pretty easy if you don’t know what you’re doing or are not paying attention. I know, because we had one at Coquitlam for a few years before we upgraded to a Stanray. What a relief. I think the shop at Moose Jaw still has their Heg in place. We bought two at the same time from Toronto Transit for a song just so we could have wheel truing ability at Coquitlam. Once we proved our ability, we were able to justify the upgrade to the Stanray.

That all said though the Heg is not a bad machine, and it suits SRY’s purposes just fine. It’s a pretty small facility, but they do a lot of good work there!