I bought this Ingersoll Rand pneumatic railroad tie tamper at a local salvage store. We use these to pack in the ballast (rock) under railroad ties to firm it up and support the track. This is known as tamping. For large numbers of ties, most railroads use a large machine that has multiple spades to tamp all 4 corners around the rail/tie intersection on both sides. They can move along quickly a cover a lot of ground. However, replacing a single tie here and there doesn't warrant the use of such a large machine so we often use the handheld version. We use compressed air from the train line, main air reservoir on the locomotive, or from our diesel air compressor on a speeder cart, depending on which equipment we have. I decided to clean up this tamper and test it before taking it apart.