The Lite and Narrow - 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
MRH-Dec 2013
