Fifty-ton shipping containers had to be passed from sky-barges to railway cars. Then, muscle power was an obsolete debt.
Lord Giles Croft stood on the eastern runway shoulder, sighting along the twin ninety-pound steel crane rails.
The rails ran the entire three-thousand-foot length of the sky-wharf, bolted directly into the granite curb with two-inch foundation studs.
Above him, towering like an iron mountain into the low gray clouds, rose the completed traveling rail overhead frame crane.
It was four hundred feet tall, framed entirely from riveted lattice steel angle-iron and Warren roof beams.
Its massive cantilever boom stretched a hundred and fifty feet out over the empty deep pit. That let it plumb the holds of hovering sky-barges moored beside the platform.
Beside Giles, Master Duncan Stone-Splitter tapped the four-wheel rail trucks with a sledgehammer.
“Thirty-two forged steel wheels,” Duncan reported, listening to the high, clear ring of the metal.
