- Road-Rail Vehicle (RRV): standard rubber-tyred running gear supplemented by flanged rail wheels, lowered hydraulically to guide the vehicle along the track
- Hydraulic excavator with backhoe arm and bucket
- Built by Orenstein & Koppel (O&K), Germany
Orenstein & Koppel was founded in Berlin in 1876, and for much of the twentieth century was best known as a major locomotive builder before diversifying into heavy construction machinery from the 1920s onwards; by the 1960s the firm had built tens of thousands of hydraulic excavators, and the O&K name remained a familiar sight on construction sites worldwide before the business was sold off in stages during the 1990s.
Road-Rail Vehicles of this type combine an ordinary wheeled excavator with a set of retractable flanged rail wheels, allowing the machine to be driven to a worksite by road before being set onto the track for precise, stable working directly on the railway. They’ve become indispensable on the modern railway for exactly this reason, and Helston’s example is no exception: a genuinely specialist vehicle capable of everything from clearing lineside vegetation to shifting ballast and materials, it has proved invaluable across the whole range of the railway’s engineering and extension work.
