Jul 30 2013
Open Post – Comments welcome
AJStrata has been swamped with work and family issues, some good some bad, all involving giving up his free time. Feel free to start a new thread of discussion on any topic of the day and relevant to the nature of his blog.
LJStrata
The Westinghouse train brake system and derivatives thereof, although reliable and trustworthy, do have failure modes that can allow for a train to end up with no brakes at all. The fact that the locomotive was shut down suggests that failure of the brakes was indeed possible and probably inevitable. Each car in the train has a compressed air reservoir for actuating the brakes. The reservoirs must be replenished or otherwise the brakes will eventually disengage. The locomotive itself has air compressors that provide the compressed air for all of the cars along the length of the entire train. Without compressed air from the locomotive, the train brakes air will deplete over time. This is why numerous hand brakes are required to be manually applied along the length of the train before the train locomotive/s engine/s are all shut down.
It important to remember that the Westinghouse brake system is intended to be fail-safe while the train is in operation. A train is considered to be in operation not when moving but when the locomotive is properly attached to the cars and its engine is actually running. So if the locomotive engines were shut down due to a fire then it is absolutely mandatory that multiple manual hand operated brakes be applied to numerous cars along the train. That didn’t happen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_air_brake
News Item: “Magnetic Field of Sun to Flip.”
Women, minorities hardest hit.
P.S. I heard that George Zimmerman snuck up to Canada and personally disabled all of those handbrakes. WELL THAT’S WHAT ANGELA COREY SAID!!!