Transporting 5 inch live steam loco

Loads of great examples here. I have just ordered a hydraulic table myself, in my wife's name as she will sign for it.

I used to do a lot of stuff with cranes and handling aids for my job, both design and use.

Generally its worth remembering that if its too heavy to lift its dangerous so buy bits and equipment that does the job, don't see how little metal you can use, use chunky stuff that fits the hand and survives errors. Its cheap, why not?

Secondly it needs to be held down in the car as well as a person, that means big bolts and brackets. Someone decided to broadside my car once and it shunted everything, its not about you driving carefully.

A problem I have to face ! Since I have an estate car I have room and I have the electric winch and arm that was in Dads estate to lift his electric wheel chair. The winch is a 12V worm drive box with a drum on the output wound with seat belt webbing and a hook The arm swings out to lift the loco from a low postion up and swings in to the car and lowers. I shall use a piece of 20mm ply with 2 lenghths of small box section as rails and build a transport box (Felt lined sides) to hide the contents which are worth 10X the value of the car. The base board will have wheels or castors to enable moving but have brakes. A simple car screw jack rated at 1Tonne could be redesigned to give the lift hight and still be able to lift 100- 150Kg, enough for most locos in 3.5" and 5" gauges. Plan B would revolve around a 1m length of 16-20mm threaded rod and nut or block. In moving from the car park to the steaming bay one needs to consider the ground and a suitable wheel type, it might be grass and wet. Well that's the plan ! Noel