Tag: rail cant hook

Wikipedia says: [Herman} Haupt considered it to be part of the Construction corps mission to “break the communications of the enemy…”. Sherman in his Atlanta and Savannah campaigns had always been “… obsessed with the efficient wrecking of railroads, and never ceased to emphasize to his subordinates the importance of twisting the rails so that they would have to be re-rolled.” Ordinary methods such as those used in constructing the track in the first instant were not portable or were too heavy to carry on raiding parties. The problem Haupt confronted was that “(e)ven when track is torn up, if the cross-ties are not burned and the rails destroyed, the time required to repair is less than is necessary to inflict the damage.” It required rendering the rails unusable. Rails that are simply bent can easily be reworked in usable shape with relatively little effort. Haupt discovered that the answer was to twist the rail in a corkscrew fashion. Any rail worked in such a manner could not be fixed in the field but required shipment back to a rolling mill to be reheated and reshaped. Smeed invented a simple contrivance called a “cant hook“. With a pair, rails could easily be twisted as well as breaking the track fasteners, or “chairs”. Smeed’s cant hooks were used in the

“…destruction of the railroads at Atlanta and were carried on the subsequent campaigns; but (Smeed’s) cant hooks appear to have been most prevalent, because they were easier to transport, and two hooks at each end of a rail could twist it the same as a wrench. The hooks were made and carried by the Michigan and Missouri engineers and by the cavalry.” Shiman, 1991