Joe,
if you look back to AaronN 's post about James Erskine patents I think that there is a picture ( E ) of a commercial RTO machine: also if you search online you will find a Gunmaker's type of RTO as manufactured by Lightwood&Sons - a treadle operated model. I would hazard a guess that Factory versions were powered by belt drive from a power shaft linked to several Lightwood machines which were manually (sic) operated - I think that there were large numbers of female employees in the munitions & cartridge manufacturer industry at that period.
