WOW! This thing is a beast! Well done on the find and getting it back ok!

I think you should go easy on the rubbing of the rails, obviously if you reduce the rial diameter by just a fraction then the bearings will have play. Maybe see how well the rust comes off with fine wire wool and wd40

The big blue job looks to be the vacuum system. If you got this up and running then it will make it much more easier to hold full sheets and cut small pieces. From the picture it looks like there are 2 x 5.5kw motors? You could run these from a phase converter (google transwave phase converters) It looks like the motors are only designed to run from 380V in delta configuration so I'm not sure you could run them from an inverter. Maybe if you could just get one of them going for now and see if you actually need to run 2....

The control panel looks pretty bog standard, so you shouldn't have any trouble getting it going.