I found the Japanese railway operation regulations enacted in 1900 (Mori Hikozo and Matsuno Chikatsu, “Locomotive Engineering,” published in 1910).
In our common sense, all wheels of a train should be equipped with brakes, but this regulation stated that only some of the wheels are sufficient. It depends on the gradient and the average operating speed. For example, if the gradient is 1/40 at 40 mph, 51% of the wheels should be used, and if the gradient is 1/200 or less at 15 mph, 7% of the wheels should be used. This is an unimaginable small number.
Here, the calculation is 2 times the driving wheels, 1.5 times the tender, and 0.5 times the empty freight cars.
In that case, a 2-4-0T tank steam locomotive without brakes can pull 10 4-wheel passenger cars with just one 4-wheel brake van on a flat line. Can you believe this?
I think this regulation was probably modeled after the British one. Was it the same in North America before air brakes became widespread?
Corporate thinking worldwide in those days often put government regulatory requrements ahead of safety and common sense. The best example is from the British Board of Trade regulations regarding life boat requirements for trans Atlantic passenger liners. For example, the Titanic.
Locomotives may have been viewed differently than freight and passenger cars due to the fact they could be put into reverse. Still kinda dumb though to run without adequate brakes.
In the hand brake era locomotives were usually equipped with what amounted to a parking brake - hand operated, most often with a chain wound around the brake staff. This arrangement did not have enough power to stop a moving train, or even the locomotive itself at any speed.
What prompted me to start looking into this was a brake van model advertised by Rapido UK (photo taken from the company’s website). The prototype is a brake van newly built by the UK’s Great Central Railway starting in 1903, and curiously enough it has three axles, making it six wheels. What’s more, it weighs 15 tonnes. What? Is it really that heavy? Surely this car alone is responsible for all the braking force in the train? Have they made it so heavy on purpose? But what about when it has vacuum brake hoses attached?
The British got off to a thrifty start with freight service by allowing private ownership of waggons, like the early days of the Pennsylvania State Railroad where everyone brought their own wagon and team and put flanged wheels on for the trip.
This accounts for most of the British waggons being short, four-wheeled in somewhat dubious state of maintenance, and equipped only with lever wagon-style brake at best.
As in the early United States these were coupled together with cheap chain, treated almost as disposable. The British figured that requiring relatively-heavy telescoping buffers solved all the safety problems with that arrangement. But they also seem to have acquired the notion that ‘wasting’ expensively-acquired forward way on a train was something thrifty people never, ever wasted, so they arranged the cheapest possible way of stopping – which was to have a specialized ‘van’ on the back, equipped as you note with extra weight and powerfully-applicable brakes, and making the train of waggons no longer than an 0-6-0 or whatever could pull.
The need to adopt power braking was handled differently in Britain, too. They chose to adopt the American Eames system because it ‘failed safe’, but that system also guaranteed no more than about 14 and a half psi at best in the brake cylinders… and of course once the ‘vacuum’ equalized, no better than whatever play or springing was in the brake foundation. There are people who think that the heavy-truck system of spring brakes could be applied to trains – and indeed it could have been, to waggons – but not with a bunch of waggons with effectively undamped buffering at their ends and a nice high polar moment of inertia…
In the steam era - locomotives were not effective as a train braking device. Remember, driver tires are shrink fit to the driver wheel center - this is normally accomplished by heating the tire, which expands to circumference marginally larger than the colder wheel center. When the tire cools its circumference shrinks and affixes the tire securely to the wheel. When tread brakes are applied to the drivers the friction between the brake shoe and the driver generates heat around the rolling circumference of the driver - if the brake shoe applies force to the driver tire too long - it CAN heat the tire to the extent that the interior circumference of the tire exceeds the exterior circumference of the driver center and now we have a REAL MESS.
Not just steam engines – there were amusing results when ‘Metroliner speeds’ with Amfleet trains were tested in the mid-Seventies before the decision to use AEM-7s.
The usual braking in the 19th Century was not with shoes, but with ‘back steam’ using the reverse. This was a godawful job with the Johnson-bar sort of reverse, or with gab gear, as you had to get the valve gear into ‘reverse’ and then open the throttle enough for counter pressure. The usual result was spinning the drivers backward, in a grand scene of steam, smoke and sparks. But if used effectively in experienced hands, even with only two driver pairs, this could get most of the way off a train so the individual car brakes could be used gently without a lot of stink and judder…
Were any modern steam locomotives fitted with handbrakes? I have seen some references to this but never any pictures or drawings except for tenders converted for others uses.
I have also recently seen mention of a valve that permitted use of the independent brake on just the tender to avoid the problem of heating the driver tires.
Mark Vinski
I have never seen any kind of hand brake mechanism on a steam locomotive itself - I have only seen them mounted on tenders. Needless to say, outside shop areas, unless they are tank engines, the locomotives are almost never exist without being couple to a tender. Outside of a shop, there would normally be a fire in the boiler and enough steam to keep the air compressors working as opposed to today’s diesels that get shut down routinely for fuel conservation.
I suspect the means of securing the engines in shop area, without tenders, was in chocking the wheels.
Well I have read stories about unattended locomotives sometimes rolling forward or backward on their own in yards. I suspect it was a rare occurrence though.
We might distinguish this from ‘nightwalking’, which is a fascinating example of “holes in the Swiss cheese”.
If you had an unattended locomotive under steam, sometimes the engine would move with the reverse at mid and throttle closed. What would happen was that the throttle would leak slightly, or differential expansion in larger boilers would tend to crack the throttle slightly open. The combination lever would provide enough valve motion to enable steam to reach the cylinders ‘enough’ to overcome friction and inertia…
If you were wondering why some locomotives have a bellcrank halfway down the reach of an external throttle rod – that cancels out the effect of differential expansion of boiler wrapper and rod.
This is amazing!
Only 4 of the 16 wheels! Well, according to the rule that driving wheels are 2 times and tenders are 1.5 times, that’s 6/24! My Yonah is 6/21.
Remember that counterpressure braking, or even spinning drivers in reverse, would also have been used – the risk of throwing a driver tire being substantial in the latter, but not the same heating as with that of shoes against the tread.
All I mean by ‘counterpressure braking’ is shifting the valve gear to some range of reverse (keep in mind most engines in this era use Stephenson with “constant-mesh” eccentrics, not hook-and-gab gear) and then carefully modulating steam, perhaps with the cylinder cocks cracked slightly, with momentum pushing the wheels around and compressing steam in the cylinders.
This is not as destructive as applying enough reverse steam to spin the drivers the opposite way, which I understood to be a fairly common practice in those days of relatively light adhesive weight and either quickly-worn or chilled-iron driver tires. It was difficult to modulate the throttle quickly or precisely on most of those contemporary 4-4-0s, although I suspect many enginemen with extensive experience might not have had the trouble we might have with it.
I suspect this would have been easier on an engine with a riding cutoff, like the Cuyahoga cutoff, but I have ne experience with whether any part of the apparatus could be prone to damage.
The le Chatelier ‘water brake’ is actually more an air brake than a steam pressure brake, although it takes a bit of thinking to understand why. When an engine drifts downhill without either drifting or shifting valves, the cylinders act as an air compressor, and if a small amount of water is introduced to the compressed volume, it will flash to steam – not so much to increase the counterpressure on the piston, but to carry away the compression heat more effectively. To prevent any chance of hydraulic lock, the ‘water’ used is from the boiler at effective saturation pressure, which will all flash to vapor at exhaust release.
Actually, I just finished reading an article in “Steam Glory 3” where a railroader recounted a tale of using chains to chock the drivers of a Niagara that had almost had a boiler explode. He mentioned removing the chains from “the gangway” which I presume means they were fairly lightweight compared to a Niagara with a passenger train going uphill with zero boiler pressure. Of course there were the airbrakes, but apparently using chains was still useful.
In North America, the situation evolved differently. Before the widespread adoption of air brakes (developed by George Westinghouse in the 1860s), railways often relied on hand brakes and other less effective systems. The regulations governing braking in North America were less standardized than in Britain or Japan, leading to a variety of practices.
Thank you for your comment, @waylonwesley.
North American railroads had a variety of environments, so as you say, practices were not uniform. If you know of any cases where the ratio of brake wheels was low, could you tell us about them? I imagine that it would have been hard for us to believe today.
The following ukiyo-e depicts Japan’s first railroad, which began operations in 1872. After the locomotive came the brake van, and it is said that the locomotive, 3 passenger cars, and a gondola all had no brakes. (The locomotive was made by Dübs and Company in Glasgow, Scotland.)
