The Mechanical Handling and Storing of Material

6o8 THE MECHANICAL HANDLING OF MATERIAL The bunker capacity at and near the docks has been so extended as to be capable of holding a very large reserve stock. The company’s engineer. Mr W. H. Wall, has designed and erected an ingenious loading apparatus at these docks which is worked by steam power, and which has greatly facilitated rapid loading. The speed at which a vessel may be loaded is only limited by the time required for trimming the cargo in the hold of the vessel. One of the company’s steamers, the “Titania,” plying between Nanaimo and San Francisco, having suitable hatches, takes her full cargo and bunker coal, amounting to 6,000 tons, in twelve hours. The coal-laden hopper wagons or trucks, each containing 5 to 6 tons of coal, are hauled from the bunkers to the approaches of the loading shoot by a 40-ton locomotive, each train containing twenty wagons. They are there left for dumping without further Figs. 853 and 854. Plan and Elevation of Wall’s Coal-Loading Device. aid from the locomotive in shunting, etc., the locomotive being fully occupied in hauling empty and full trains to and from the bunkers and the mines. In Figs. 853 and 854 may be seen the double tracks a and b, which serve each of the sets of loading shoots along the supply track a. The train of laden trucks is drawn by a grip dog to within one truck length of the end, where it is held in check by a safety stop which prevents the truck coming along the supply track until the carriage c is in a position to receive a truck. The dog then draws the end truck on to a transferring carriage (which is mounted on trolley wheels running on a transverse track), is pushed across the trackway until it registers with the parallel dumping track b, and unless unloaded into the first or highest shoot through the opening in the carriage, the truck is pushed by a piston rod on to the dumping track, as far as the shoot opening into which its contents are to be dumped (suitable to the height of the water, see Fig. 855). When emptied, the truck is taken hold of by the double dogs situated on either side