Regarding the tamper.
The basis for the tamper is a "Big Joe" stacker. A stacker is like a small battery-powered, hand driven forklift. We got the stacker (auction or something, I forget how exactly) specifically for the up-down. The name for the whole contraption is thus "Big Joe".
Next we built a carriage in the shop to put it on, then mounted it on the front. When we needed to use it, we rented an air compressor and put it on the back. Without the compressor it was front-heavy, so we weighed it down with scrap ties. Initially it only got use during the work weekends when we rented the compressor. Oh, and greatly modified the forklift part to have the structure for carrying the tampers (which are air-powered jitterbugs).
Somebody donated a trailer-mounted Lindsey compressor to us, which after some TLC to get reliabily operable we mounted on the back of the car and piped it to the front. We removed the tires "temporarily". We ended up giving it a larger gas tank, mounted outside the compressor unit.
As the stacker was battery-powered, we found that it didn't last too long on the continuous up-and-down of tamping. We had to jump it to the battery of the compressor. Somebody else donated a hydraulic motor, and eventually we hydraulic-ized the up-down. As it only has 2 sets of tampers on each side, it has an in-out feature as well, which also hydraulic driven. So we have to go over each piece of track that we tamp twice.
Next somebody said that since we have a hydraulic motor, why don't we make it self-propelled? So we did that. There's another motor somewhere underneath that makes it go. It moves a stately 1.5 mph, give or take a few tenths. To tow it anywhere we remove the drive chain.
As you can guess, the device is pretty loud.
