Handcar
railroad car powered by its passengers, or by people pushing the car from behind
A handcar (also known as a pump trolley, pump car, rail push trolley, push-trolley, jigger, Kalamazoo, velocipede, gandy dancer cart, platelayers' cart, draisine, or railbike) is a railroad car powered by its passengers or by people pushing the car from behind. It is mostly used as a railway maintenance of way or mining car, but it was also used for passenger service in some cases.
Design and function
A typical design consists of an arm, called the walking beam, that pivots seesaw-like on a base, which the passengers alternately push down and pull up to move the car.
An even simpler design is pushed by two or four people (called trolleymen), with hand brakes to stop the trolley. When the trolley slows down, two trolleymen jump off the trolley and push it till it picks up speed. Then they jump into the trolley again, and the cycle continues. The trolleymen take turns in pushing the trolley to maintain the speed and avoid fatigue. Four people were also required to safely lift the trolley off the rail tracks when a train approaches.
Rail tracks have a tendency to develop various defects, including cracks, loose packing etc., which may lead to accidents. The first rail inspections were done visually.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Handcar” is railroad car powered by its passengers, or by people pushing the car from behind. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Handcar, railroad and powered, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “railroad car powered by its passengers, or by people pushing the car from behind” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3008463.
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This entry incorporates text from “Handcar” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.