>
>>
>>>I mentioned this accident to my wife, and she said she heard a TV news
>>>report that said the train was changing crews, and it may have been on a
>>>slope. So, we may be talking about "parking breaks". It did a lot of
>>>damage.
>>>
>>
>> The accident strikes me as being a bit odd. The Westinghouse Safety
>> Brake applies the brake shoes in the absence of compressed air, the
>> opposite of the earlier K-Brake system. This was the invention that made
>> George Westinghouse fabulously rich, before he teamed up with Tesla and
>> began generating electricity. The brakes should have been fully applied
>> as soon as the air coupling from the locomotives was broken. It's
>> basically a dead-man system.
>>
>> This accident actually sounds more like deliberate sabotage.
>>
>
>I assumed that the locomotives were still coupled, that only the personnel
>were changing.
>
Yes, but somehow they became uncoupled from the locomotives and rolled
away. In the knuckle coupling that we use here in North America (and
elsewhere), there is often a safety pin at the top of the knuckle that prevents
the knuckle from being accidentally unlocked. When the cars become uncoupled
and break away, the compressed air line is broken (the "glad hands") and the
brakes on the uncoupled cars should have been applied. You can release the
brakes manually, but it takes a few turns on a handwheel to do so, or you can
use air stored in a reservoir on each car. Here's a better description of the
Westinghouse Safety Brake:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_air_brake
Chris
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