The Lite and Narrow Column - 8
Larry cars
With the number of furnaces in use, there had to be some
efficient way to get the raw coal to the ovens. Photographs
from the late 1860s indicate that some kind of long push cart
was used on rails along the tops of the early enclosed beehives,
with men shoveling the coal into the ovens through the fill hole
on top. While easier then pushing a wheelbarrow up a wooden
ramp, such as used for the open beehives, it was still not
efficient enough to meet the demand that soon developed.
Sometime in the late 1870s, and that is a guess, a car was
invented to load the beehives from above. It was called a
larry car. Larry cars are defined as a car moving on rails and
9: Coke ovens at Sewell, WV on Ron Lane’s Mann’s
Creek Railway. Two of the ovens have smoke units
installed. Photo by Ron Lane.
9
equipped on its underside with a hopper, used to charge coke
ovens from above. It is thought to be a corruption of the British
word lorry, which means truck.
The cars are a standard design with a hopper mounted above
an open framework and a chute on one or both sides to load
the coal into the beehive. The cars are small. Powered cars are
approximately 12’6” long and 8’6” wide. Non-powered cars are
8’6” long and 8’6” wide. Both cars ride on two axles, some with
journal boxes, some without.
The chutes are manually operated with a control wheel located
on either end of the car to lower and raise the chutes by
chains. Drawings of a two-chute powered car, built by H.C. Frick
for use at Scottsdale, PA, are in
Model Railroader,
June, 1981.
The author states that these cars were used to transport coke
MRH-Dec 2013
