Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
A railway air brake is a railway brake power braking system with compressed air as the operating medium. [ 1] Modern trains rely upon a fail-safe air brake system that is based upon a design patented by George Westinghouse on April 13, 1869. [ 2] The Westinghouse Air Brake Company was subsequently organized to manufacture and sell Westinghouse ...
The electro-pneumatic brake system on British mainline railway trains was introduced in 1950 and remains the primary braking system for multiple units in service today, although London Transport underground trains had been fitted with EP brakes since the 1920s. The Southern Region of British Railways operated a self-contained fleet of electric ...
The Westinghouse system used an air compressor on the locomotive, an air reservoir and a special valve on each car, and a single compressed-air pipe running the length of the train (with flexible connections) which both refilled the reservoirs and controlled the brakes, allowing the engineer to apply and release the brakes simultaneously on all ...
Traditional train braking systems use pneumatic valves to control and generate brake applications on the cars along the length of the train. In general, this conventional system consists of a brake pipe that runs the length of the train which supplies air to reservoirs mounted on each of the cars. When the brake pipe and car components are ...
Air pump / Air compressor Westinghouse pump (US+) Powered by steam, it compresses air for operating the train air brake system. [3]: 2 The Westinghouse air brake system is used world-wide; [3]: 93 in Europe two systems that use the same principle are the Kunze-Knorr and Oerlikon systems. It can be a single-stage or, when larger capacity is ...
Georg Knorr (1859–1911) The Kunze-Knorr brake ( Kunze-Knorr-Bremse or KK-Bremse) is an automatic compressed-air brake for goods, passenger and express trains. It was the first graduated brake for goods trains in Europe. When it was introduced after the First World War, goods train brakes switched from hand operation to compressed-air in ...
However, air brakes can be made much more effective than vacuum brakes for a given size of brake cylinder. An air brake compressor is usually capable of generating a pressure of 90 psi (620 kPa; 6.2 bar) vs only 15 psi (100 kPa; 1.0 bar) for vacuum. With a vacuum system, the maximum pressure differential is atmospheric pressure (14.7 psi or 101 ...
Although the plain automatic air brake was a great improvement over the straight air brake, in an emergency the system still applied the brakes to the last cars in a train later than to the first cars in a train. To remedy that condition, George Westinghouse invented the quick-action triple valve in 1887.