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Rail Mounted Cranes
This was what the Coles Brothers started out making in 1878. Steam rail cranes were one of the backbones on the industrial revolution. These cranes were massive and very heavy, the only way to make them mobile at all was by placing them on rails.

These rails crane were the main stay of Coles production untill the 1930s.

Here we see a group of these crane working on the construction of the river locks at Stoke Bardolph, bringing improvements to allow the Trent waterway to take larger commercial barges. This taken in 1922 shows how these cranes worked, tracks were laid as necessary and moved around to take the cranes where they were needed to work.

Thanks above & left Picture the Past. (Notts County historical photo archive)
It was a time of improving technology and although steam would dominate the railways for another forty years there were developments with the new internal combustion engine. This image is of a Coles rail unit from 1913 using a petrol engine driving a light crane based on the same layout as the steam unit.
In 1928 Coles launched this diesel mechanical crane in both rail version and road version. This was self mobile though direct drive on a central shaft and had a lift of three tons. (see model of road version for full details).


The development of the patrol/diesel electric units lead to changes in design and the development of the EMA type range of mobile road cranes. These changes were reflected in new rail cranes. As lift and size grew larger on the mobile lorry cranes these units were adapted and mounted on bogies for the rail network.


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