(first posted 10/23/2012) Time for something a little different. These retired workhorses have been part of the scenery in front of a quarry near Blackhawk State Park for years, but I rarely get out to this part of town. Recently (and for the first time since I started writing for CC) I saw them again and just had to investigate. Initially, I was going to do an Outtake, but these compelling old vehicles prompted me to find out more. I knew they were old, but who made them? Well, after a little investigation I now know a lot more. Let’s take a closer look.
If I recall correctly, for about 15 years now this dump truck and crane have formed a sort of roadside display. As you can tell from the photo, they are decorated with strings of lights, and now that I have a nicer camera, I’ll have to see if I can get an early evening/nighttime shot. This imposing piece of machinery is a late ’40s or early ’50s Euclid–an R24, as far as I can tell.
image: the-gauge.net
The Euclid Company of Ohio was started in the ’20s as a maker rotary scrapers and other earth-moving equipment. In 1934, they introduced their first dump truck, the 1Z, which was powered by a 100-horse Waukesha engine.
Throughout Euclid’s existence, their forte was earth-moving equipment, the aforementioned scrapers and gigantic off-road dump trucks like this one–not exactly things meant to be driven down the street! The fact that this one is sitting at a quarry speaks volumes about their preferred use when they were new.
As for the company itself, Euclid grew into a much bigger–and more profitable–organization, and by the early ’50s had attracted the eye of a GM then in its heyday of power and profitability. In 1953, GM they bought out Euclid, thus adding dump trucks to an already diverse lineup that included Caddies, Chevrolets, Electro-Motive diesel engines and Frigidaire refrigerators.
However, it wasn’t long before GM, as the 800-pound gorilla of American industry, attracted the attention of then-Attorney General William P. Rogers. In 1959, Rogers filed an anti-trust suit against the titanic corporation, claiming that its sheer size was endangering other U.S. companies. While GM’s army of lawyers were able to hold off the Feds for years, they eventually relented and sold Euclid to White Motor Company in 1968.
The sale of Euclid to White marked the beginning of its slide from dominance. While Euclid would never again experience the prosperity of its earlier years, the well-built and over-engineered Euclid trucks, including this survivor, remind us of why the company did so well for so long.
In a way, Euclid is still alive; after operating under various ownership (including Daimler-Benz and Volvo) between 1977 and 1993, the company finally was purchased by Hitachi Construction Machinery. Even though Hitachi currently builds 100% of the output, many products leave the factory with a Euclid badge.
And now for the other half of our pair. In 1918, Northwest Engineering Co., of Green Bay, Wisconsin, started building ocean-going tugboats during World War I. Unfortunately for NW, they came out too late in the war to put much in the company’s coffers. In 1920, after seeing no remaining interest in tugboats, NW decided to build a copy of the cranes used in their shipyard. After that, cranes became their bread-and-butter, notwithstanding about 1,000 additional tugboats they built during WWII.
Early NW cranes used boilers to operate the booms and move around, but by the ’40s these had been replaced with diesel engines–perhaps one of which you can see hiding in the shadows in the picture. Can anyone identify it?
In 1983, Northwest was taken over by Terex Corporation. Ironically, Terex had been set up by GM in 1968 to produce construction equipment not covered by the federal ruling that prompted the sale of Euclid to White. The final cranes were built in 1990, when the factory closed. I’d never have guessed that this pair would wind up sharing so much history. They are certainly connected by more than first met my eyes!
Amazing how old construction equipment like this turns us all into little kids. I love this stuff. I wonder how old that Crane is? It is amazing that someone has let it sit for so long. But, I suppose that in today’s world, both pieces are essentially worthless as being much too small for use in a modern operation.
These remind me of the occasional old piece of farm equipment I will see along a country road in the midwest. I know just enough about farming to know that nobody with a lick of sense would try to use that kind of equipment commercially today. Great stuff.
These vehicles are sitting in front of an active quarry. It appears that the owners use them as a sort of sign. They have been kept up cosmetically over the years.
When you read “Mike Mulligan and His Steamshovel” as a kid, the sight of this old iron can’t help but take you back. One of the best kids books ever.
And that’s exactly what I thought of when I first saw this.
Agreed!
Ditto! Now I’m tearing apart my cellar see if my
hard cover edition is still down there!
I’ve never forgotten that book and I bought a copy for my oldest about 18 years ago and I still pick it up and read it once in a while.
You’ve got to be kidding me! The clue WAS an actual vehicle!
Surely you deliberately made the CC Clue look like a plastic model or something deliberately just to throw us off. If that was the case, congratulations! If not…oh well, I’m not too good at this.
Not only was it an actual vehicle…ggh06 nailed it on the first guess!
I bow down to the car-identifying hive-mind that is CC.
Woo hoo, first one I’ve managed to win. I should mention that I had a die-cast model of one of these when I was a kid; that radiator cap in the photo was a dead giveaway.
These two pieces of equipment may have been parked for 15 years but someone must be interested enough to keep the paint fresh.
I agree. That red would fade rather quickly.
Equipment like this is built to last for a long time, and engineered so most all the working parts can be replaced. Nevertheless there always seems to come a time when no matter how well the old rig has been kept up, a new one can outwork it.
I like to see displays like this even if they’re static, and most of them are. One can imagine the cost and labor involved in keeping either of these big, heavy old things in running and working condition.
One of my friends was involved in the Puget Sound Railroad Museum, and used to regale me with stories about keeping the old steam locomotive running. Sometimes it seemed as though the process was similar to having the fireman shovel dollar bills from the tender into the firebox.
> keeping the old steam locomotive running. Sometimes it seemed as though the process was similar to having the fireman shovel dollar bills from the tender into the firebox.
Maintaining any older machinery is expensive. However, it is not so much more expensive compared to maintaining a newer machine. The more expensive a machine, the more expensive it is to maintain. When the parts supply dries out, it is finished; unless you get custom parts. Then it gets more expensive. A locomotive is a million dollar piece of specialised machinery, so high maintenance is to be expected.
The more expensive a machine, the more expensive it is to maintain.
That’s just not true. And the diesel locomotive is perhaps the best example of that. Compared to steam locomotives, its maintenance needs are absolutely miniscule. It was exactly for that reason that it displaced the steam locomotive. You know that a steam locomotive could only some hundreds of miles before having to be maintained? Long distance trains had to have fresh locomotives waiting every so often on their run. Diesels could run for weeks without any attention other than fuel. That’s why steam was ditched so quickly; labor and maintenance costs were much greater than the capital investment, amortized.
And there are plenty of fifty year-old and older diesel locomotives still at work here on the small branch lines.
I’ll not get into the whole steam vs. diesel jihad in rail. I didn’t mention steam or diesel locomotives. I meant that maintaining a new *similar* machine is not going to cost much less than maintaining an older example till parts are available. The fact that fifty year-old diesels are still at work lends support to my assertion. If maintaining newer locos was substantially cheaper or easier, the old diesels would’ve been scrapped.
Diesel-electric locomotives are substantially better than steamers, mainly due to their electric transmission. Even if they cost the same, they’re the best at low-speed heavy haulage, can be combined/MU’d, electrically controlled, etc., etc. This, together with the fact that US railroads had exactly this need, becoming a freight-only scam, the fact that diesels cost less to maintain was surely a bonus. A good, if biased, article discussing this in detail— http://www.railway-technical.com/st-vs-de.shtml
Also, U.S. steam tech was horribly behind state-of-the art in the 50s, so a comparison of period American steam locomotives with diesels is even more skewed. Steam may still have a future in high-speed passenger rail, but I doubt it, unless these guys have their way— http://www.gizmag.com/csr-project-130-steam-locomotive/22670/
I seriously think heavy, more efficient road-trucks and buses on road-tax funded highways are even more modular and convenient than freight trains, and with some work can be made equally/more efficient. We’re already seeing mechanical transmissions in trucks that rival the diesel locos of decades past, and the adhesion in trucks’ rubber tyres is very much better than steel wheels which require a lot of dead weight to move at all.
I’m still a steam fan though. A steam-electric at 45% efficiency? That’s something to MM about, even if its been tried and failed once. 🙂
“In 1953, GM they bought out Euclid, thus adding dump trucks to an already diverse lineup that included Caddies, Chevrolets, Electro-Motive diesel engines and Frigidaire refrigerators.”
Thus, in fifties and sixties America, Euclid dump trucks helped build the freeways that opened the suburbs to Chevy owners who bought new Caddies and Frigidaires shipped behind EMF locomotives. No wonder GM ruled the world.
Ford may have been the pioneer of large scale vertical integration, but Sloan’s GM utterly mastered it.
Not vertical integration but horizontal. Ford’s method was to source the mine for ore and coal and turn out finished automobile. GM’s method was to diversify into different, related or unrelated fields and hope for the best. If some synergy arose (most famously with air-conditioning) it was wonderful, if not they could simply divest the division. Too bad GM managers weren’t well-equipped to deal with an Eastern-style conglomerate business model, but that’s what GM had become—more than the sum of its parts.
Don’t forget the buying out of streetcar companies by the front corp National City Lines, which would then decide, gee, what we really need is to get rid of these tracks and buy some GMC buses.
The issue with Terex, Euclid and GM is interesting. GM’s divestment of Euclid must have just involved certain models, because I’m quite sure I remember a pretty full line of Terex off-road trucks and such when it was owned by GM. Back then, I assumed GM had just changed the name of their construction line from Euclid to Terex.
The anti-competitive order only held firm for a period of years.
GM waited it out; and launched Terex dumps as soon as it expired, IIRC. Don’t know the exact dates; but the Terex factory was down the road (25 miles) from where I grew up, and – the Interstate coming late to Cleveland – it was Terex dumps that built our leg of I-90 in the early 1980s.
Speaking, as pfsm was, of steam locomotives…I’m a little disappointed that they didn’t choose a Lima crane for their display.
The Lima Locomotive Works in Ohio, down that future Interstate in the other direction…was an interesting paradigm of rise and fall; a harbinger of today’s post-industrial apocalypse. Lima rose from a small machine shop in the late 1800s to one of three premier locomotive builders by the 1940s…only to lose it all with the conversion to diesel motive power.
Their hedge and sideline, cranes and shovels, kept the Lima plant open into the early 1980s, through three mergers that left it ever smaller…until all that was left was an EPA Superfund site. Never has so much come from so little to disappear so quickly…
Looks more at home in 2012 than that 1980s Subaru XT also featured today…
Utility machinery generally doesn’t *look* obsolete. The difference is under the hood, and so is the obsolescence. In this case, its also that the older stuff is simply too small.
Automotive styling differentiation is essentially an American phenomenon. In Germany, for example, it was perfectly OK to buy a car in 1969 that looked exactly like your father’s older 1945 model that he bought new and then proceeded to drive for ever. In some ways, that era is back, with modern cars having longer and longer refreshes.
The only 1969 car that looked like a ’45 was the Beetle, and I can assure there was nation-wide Beetle fatigue that had set in well before 1969 in Germany. What the young buyers were flocking to were cars like the Capri and such.
American kids in the sixties may have embraced the Beetle because of it being anachronistic, but young Germans were sick of it, and avoided it if at all possible, in the usual rejection of the prior generation’s tastes.
very cool to see a post on some equipment ive worked on ! , All the NW cranes i worked on had murphy engines and for the euclids had detroits with allison trans which would exsplain GM s involvement with them too the late seventys wene they become cummins powered ,
I think that I saw you visited my site so I came to return the favor. I’m trying to find things to improve my web site!
Nice display of two classic machines. The “crane” in the picture is not a crane, but an 80-D shovel. The 80-D was introduced in 1933, and was available as a crane, dragline, pullshovel (Northwest’s term for a backhoe), and a shovel, as seen here. The bucket size on an 80-D is 2 1/2 cubic yards.
Power for this machine was the Murphy Diesel MP-21, a low-revving, high torque diesel engine. The machine seen in the picture is most likely from 1950 onward to around 1970. Early machhines were fully mechanical from the operator’s levers, from around 1965 the controls were air controlled.
The 80-D was a very popular machine, and many served throughout the country, especially during the construction of the Interstate highway system.
A fine machine that embodied the best from Northwest engineering Company.
On the engine question: the diesel in this is a Murphy MP-21. Standard motor for the Northwests. The machine model is an 80-D.
hello mario,
im currently staying in Funafuti, Tuvalu, located in the South Pacific. I drove by the remains of one of these 80-D models beside the road that was left behind here after WW2. Theres actually two of them here, “whats left of them, one is laying on its side in the Lagoon and the other one by the road. The ID plate your standing beside is still visible on one, so I decided to investigate the machines history further online. Thanks for your work.
David
I was running a 43,000 lb. excavator back in 1996, loading VW Bug-sized boulders into the back of an identical looking Euclid. That thing was a Beast! Then I took a ride in it (as a passenger) with a full load of boulders, down a long steep hill, with very little brakes. I think I had to change my boxer-briefs after that little ride? The driver asked if I wanted to drive it? Nope, no way… I don’t have a death wish!
I gather the design didn’t change much over the years?
Also, a local building contractor has an identical looking one as well…. just sitting out by the main office, with the bed in full tilt position, to keep it debris free. I think it still runs, as they have a 5 gallon bucket placed over the exhaust, some big battery’s and it is complete!
I might add, the name “Euclid” was a generic name for large dump trucks , as “Winnebago” is to motorhomes, and “Kleenex” is to facial tissue around here in the Northeast.
Regarding the relationship between Euclid and Terex: GM was actually planning their own line of earth moving equipment at the close of WWII, and had a series of crawlers on the drawing boards when they acquired Euclid. At the time, Euclid made little more than off road dump trucks and scrapers, though they were quite successful. GM quickly rolled their new construction equipment operations into Euclid, and shortly thereafter the GM designed crawlers were on the market wearing the Euclid name. Also from that point on, the majority of Euclid equipment came equipped with Detroit Diesel power, though Cummins was still offered. GM rapidly expanded the Euclid line to include wheeled loaders and dozers, and Euclid became a full line equipment manufacturer rivaling Caterpillar. When the court ordered divestiture came in 1967, GM was forced to sell off all product lines that constituted Euclid at time of the acquisition, but was allowed to keep what they had before and was was developed after the acquisition. Those operations became Terex.
Terex is an interesting brand though probably not related it exists in Australia to build cranes and mining equipment in Brisbane, my brother is a parts interpreter with them being their Melbourne based representative.
When I was a kid, my parents bought me a toy steam shovel for Christmas. They told the department store Santa to suggest to me that I wanted one. I wasn’t too bright, and envisioned a shovel with steam coming out of it. I couldn’t imagine why I would want something like that, so I was adamant that I didn’t want one. Today, I wish they hadn’t given it away when I got older, along with all of my other metal vehicles.
Somewhere I have photos I took of a LeTourneau-Westinghouse dump truck that didn’t make it across a two lane bridge in Colorado back in the 1960’s. That was the most interesting thing I saw on our vacation that year. I was a strange child.
I have a couple old signs. From a northwest shovel . What are the original colors ?
I’m a third generation construction man. My grandfather and father owned many Northwest (models 41, 6, 8, and several 95’s including 95-70s and one 95wt) deadlines. I was born in 1955 and knew how to crank the great sounding Murphy engine. I set in my grandfather’s lap and pulled the levers, knew which one to pull and when, could not reach the brakes. Actually took naps in the engine room, it is a wonder I did get hurt. My family’s company was A.H. Houston and Son. Thinking of this brings back great memories of outstanding men who were Northwest men to the bone
In 1965 I drove a Euc like this one, out from under a Northwest 80-D shovel like this one, in a limestone quarry in Central Texas. I tumped the Euc over one day but was only slightly injured…by the dozens of Delaware Punch bottles I had pitched on the floor, which rained down on me. After that I was called a Euc Skinner, which at least allowed me to strut around the quarry a little bit. Pretty good job; buck-and-a-half an hour and sixty hours a week, barring rain.