Locomotive handbrakes will slide the wheel after about 50’. Then if the handbrake is on a front axle, you get the nice thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump as you run.
Don’t shove locomotive handbrakes. Ever. I’ve had to rip a conductor or two in my day about it.
Head and shoulders above anything else, that aspect is the best part of this forum, IMO.
Here is an interesting runaway report with a cause of both handbrake failure and airbrake failure. Engineer made an emergency application because his train was getting out of control while descending a grade. The application stopped the train, and he got out and set 35 handbrakes to secure it. On his way back to the engine, the air brakes had leaked enough to release, and the train began to roll because 35 handbrakes were not enough to hold it. He was able to get back on the engine while was moving, and he rode it out to the bottom of the grade where it eventually stopped.
Railway Investigation Report R11Q0056
Runaway train
Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railway
Freight train LIM-55
Mile 67.20, Wacouna Subdivision
Dorée, Quebec
11 December 2011
https://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/rail/2011/r11q0056/r11q0056.html
Deeper into the report, it goes into issues regarding defects in the handbrakes and the airbrake cylinders. It gets into the problem of determining the number of handbrakes needed when maintenance deficiencies degrade handbrake effectiveness, and different people apply them to different degrees of tightness.&
[quote user=“Euclid”]
Here is an interesting runaway report with a cause of both handbrake failure and airbrake failure. Engineer made an emergency application because his train was getting out of control while descending a grade. The application stopped the train, and he got out and set 35 handbrakes to secure it. On his way back to the engine, the air brakes had leaked enough to release, and the train began to roll because 35 handbrakes were not enough to hold it. He was able to get back on the engine while was moving, and he rode it out to the bottom of the grade where it eventually stopped.
Railway Investigation Report R11Q0056
Runaway train
Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railway
Freight train LIM-55
Mile 67.20, Wacouna Subdivision
Dorée, Quebec
11 December 2011
https://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/rail/2011/r11q0056/r11q0056.html
Deeper into the report, it goes into issues regarding defects in the handbrakes and the airbrake cylinders. It gets into the problem of determining the number of handbrakes needed when maintenance deficiencies degrade handbrake effectiveness, a
[quote user=“BaltACD”]
Euclid
Here is an interesting runaway report with a cause of both handbrake failure and airbrake failure. Engineer made an emergency application because his train was getting out of control while descending a grade. The application stopped the train, and he got out and set 35 handbrakes to secure it. On his way back to the engine, the air brakes had leaked enough to release, and the train began to roll because 35 handbrakes were not enough to hold it. He was able to get back on the engine while was moving, and he rode it out to the bottom of the grade where it eventually stopped.Railway Investigation Report R11Q0056
Runaway train
Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railway
Freight train LIM-55
Mile 67.20, Wacouna Subdivision
Dorée, Quebec
11 December 2011https://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/rail/2011/r11q0056/r11q0056.html
Deeper into the report, it goes into issues regarding defects in the handbrakes and the airbrake cylinders. It gets into the problem of determining the number of handbrakes needed when
Now I’m curious, I’ve seen a good number of loaded cars that have moved many miles with the handbrake applied, and I’ve yet to see one that locked up and skidded. Several of them rolled far enough that the brakes shoes melted.
And before anyone asks, we either spotted them on roll-bys or got to deal with them after they arrived in the yard, by which time the damage has already been done.
Empties and locomotives both skid easily, and I would never dare to drag them around.
I have seen a few other (empty) cars that have skidded for long distances, resulting in flat spots several inches long and large lumps of slag on the wheel tread. In this case it is best to leave the handbrake applied and drag it in the clear, those wheels are already scrap and if they start rolling there is a good chance they will derail.
We had a car that we think had a handbrake not fully released. Rolled OK until things warmed up due to the friction. Fortunately, it did slide with no untoward results (other than the one wheel melted as noted) - it was an occupied passenger car.
Regarding the subject of moving trains while handbrakes are applied, I recall CSX rules about handling a train that has stopped on a long steep grade, and is faced with the need to recharge and release air brakes before proceeding. In that case, the rules allow leaving all of the handbrakes that had been set for securement to remain applied as the train descends the grade. So that could be miles of travel with hand brakes applied to maybe 75 cars.
How does one do a #1 brake test from a ‘moving vehicle’ on a train equipped with 4-cylinder TMB? Just note the position of the shoes?
400 cars bought … again, like all these runaway stories, from the United States … and “LIM” tested only twenty-four of them???
110 cars, 175 cylinders replaced, 165 valves replaced, “brake rigging adjusted” (on TMB??) Air brakes that ‘release’ from an emergency set in an hour? As I asked my father at a Giants game where the scoreboard read -496 yards at halftime, “is that normal?”
(Before we hear anything about Chinese maintenance standards from people reading the report, it’s a misspelling. The company that owns the railway at least from Emeril Junction to Schefferville is First Nations, and the name is Tshiuetin, which I’m told means “North Wind”. Strange that the misspelling hasn’t been corrected in nearly a decade. Stranger that they, too, seem to have gone along with this whole maintenance charade.)
The situation with descending a grade with many handbrakes set – assume the ‘correct’ number in TC’s little post-1996 ‘table’ – is little different from descending a grade with the air brakes appropriately set. If I understand brakes correctly, if these emergency handbrakes were applied with the air ‘emergency set’ they will be pre-loaded for easier winding even if the mechanisms are not well lubricated, and will be applied to some percentage of that set’s clamping force after the air brakes are released – so they can be thought of as like a more enthusiastic version of retainers.
The only drawback to this is if the train encounters repeated sawtooth grades before the handbrakes are released, any one of which of course provides the opportunity for a train to be stopped ‘over the crest’ with half its weight on either side so the brakes could be applied, the handbra
[quote user=“SD70Dude”]
BaltACD
Euclid
Here is an interesting runaway report with a cause of both handbrake failure and airbrake failure. Engineer made an emergency application because his train was getting out of control while descending a grade. The application stopped the train, and he got out and set 35 handbrakes to secure it. On his way back to the engine, the air brakes had leaked enough to release, and the train began to roll because 35 handbrakes were not enough to hold it. He was able to get back on the engine while was moving, and he rode it out to the bottom of the grade where it eventually stopped.Railway Investigation Report R11Q0056
Runaway train
Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railway
Freight train LIM-55
Mile 67.20, Wacouna Subdivision
Dorée, Quebec
11 December 2011https://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/rail/2011/r11q0056/r11q0056.html
Deeper into the report, it goes into issues regarding def
For CN and CP, the poor maintenance standards came with Hunter Harrison and all his cuts.
Once they get moving so fast, I think they break free. But at slower (yard) speeds, you can def’n slide loads. Now you have to put a good brake on them - not a wimpy road conductor brake! [:-^]
How to get a hand brake really tight? Charge the air brake system and then dynamite it before tying the brake. The extra emergency air in the brake cylinder pushes out the brake piston a little bit more.
That’s also a possible remedy if one can’t get a hand brake to release because it’s too tight.
Jeff
Even a full service makes a difference you can feel.
Maybe this is a dumb question.
In the case of the runaway in Euclid’s link above, I’m wondering if the engineer maybe should have fully recharged the brake line, then done an emergency set. Yes, for the time it would have taken to do the recharging, the train would have been without whatever benefit the air brakes were still providing. How long would that have been? Maybe it would have been worth it?
Its hard to know, I guess, how much stopping power he was still getting from the air brakes. Maybe hardly any, since the train was rolling despite lots of handbrakes set. Maybe it would have been worth the gamble to pump the air back up, then dump it.
One of the NTSB runaway accidents I read, The NTSB did some testing and found on a nominal 2% grade - if the speed of 100 ton capacity cars exceeded 15 MPH, the air brakes on the car - no matter if applied in service or emergency would fade to ineffectiveness as they overheated from the task. To control trains on this kind of territory effectived dynamic braking was required in addition to air brakes.
As a result of this, CSX implemented the following restriction
[quote user=“CSX TTSI - Mountain Sub”]
5559 STEEP GRADE (1% OR MORE) TRAIN HANDLING
I’m almost certain the composite-shoe outgassing issue dominated the last part of the runup to 63mph (with the train as reported in full dynamic!) but another part of this is the 175 cylinders (at the given 4 cylinders per truck, 8 per car) and 165 valves out of 110 cars that were unworkable. I suspect more of them, perhaps a great many, were only borderline ‘passing’ testing, and that testing is for only a small percentage of their ‘new’ performance.
As I recall in the report, he already had to stop the train (from 38mph) with an emergency application on the same grade, which was the situation where the train started rolling again, so unless the grade pitched sharply down after that point I think “other conditions” were aggravating factors.
Remember that the 63mph was not only with full dynamics but 35 handbrakes set… it would have taken a while for the set shoes to heat to outgassing fade.
I find the brake cylinder count to be a tad ambiguous. Are there four brake cylinders per car, or per truck? Our passenger cars have two cylinders per truck, one on each side.
We used to have several cars with single cylinders on which it was necessary to kick the brake shoe during the Class 1 test, both set and released. The shoes normally ran so close to the tread that a simple visual check was not sufficient to know either, especially when in release. On most of our cars, the shoes will fall slightly away from the tread in release.
It’s important to know how many cylinders there actually were, as the number of cylinders replaced changes a percentage. If it’s eiight per car, then just under a quarter of the cylinders were replaced, presumably because they weren’t working. If it’s just four cylinders per car, we now have nearly half the cars without effective brakes.
What
That’s what I’m asking.
I’ve worked with cars with on cylinder, and our passenger cars generally have four. I’ve never seen eight, which would be two per axle, other than on locomotives.