Combination shear/punch from railroad boiler shop...
A railroad shop I worked in had one of these as late as 1999. Not in use, but still connected to the 250 vdc rectifier that ran the overhead cranes at the time. Machines were original to the 1914 era building.
When I first went to work there as the maintenance man... I wandered all over the cavernous place, checking out what few relics that remained from the days of steam.
They had a wheel press, a boring mill and this punch/shear. Nobody seemed to care what I was doing, so I proceeded to figure out how to power up this thing. It had some sort of starting mechanism with mulitiple notches and a couple of levers. At first I tried to put the lever over to the end of it's travel... and it would "trip". Finally figured out to go notch by notch and let it speed up gradually... then latch it at the end... and it ran just fine.
Big, open frame electric motor mounted at the joint where the two halves of the machine met, spur gear drive.
It still had a few punches and dies in the tool cabinet, but the only set was a ¾" diameter round.
So, I put them in and got them tightened up... started the machine and got ready to try it out.
I found a piece of 5/8" thick steel... put it under the punch, stepped on the pedal... and 'kerchunk", it made a revolution and made a nice big hole right through that plate!
I punched three or four more holes and went looking for the shop foreman and shop superintendent to demonstrate the machine for them.
I drug them up there and their first question was "what in the hell is this thing". Been there forever and these guys had no idea what it was or what it was for.
I showed them, the superintendent was disinterested... but the foreman thought it was neat, at least.
It never got turned on again... a few years after I left, they scrapped it, the boring mill and wheel press and overhead cranes... got new cranes.
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