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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 ]
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 ...
[3] Its first section makes it unlawful, among other things, for a railroad company engaged in interstate commerce to run any train without having a sufficient number of the cars so equipped with train brakes (such as air brakes) that the engineer on the locomotive can control the speed of the train without requiring brakemen to use a hand ...
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.
Westinghouse Air Brake Company's Rotair Valve [18] The first form of the air brake consisted of an air pump, a main reservoir (pressure vessel), and an engineer's valve on the locomotive, and of a train pipe and brake cylinder on each car. One problem with this first form of the air brake was that braking was applied to the first cars in a ...
On January 2, 1991, Knorr-Bremse acquired New York Air Brake's rail braking business from General Signal, however, they did not purchase Stratopower, or Dynapower. [ 2 ] By the end of 1993, NYAB stopped manufacturing the Westinghouse brake in favor of Knorr-Bremse's improved DB-60 air brake featuring poppet valve technology.
A pair of gladhand connectors between railroad cars A gladhand connector on a trailer. A gladhand connector or gladhand coupler is an interlocking hose coupling fitted to hoses supplying pressurized air from a tractor unit to air brakes on a semi-trailer, [1] or from a locomotive to railway air brakes on railroad cars. [2]
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 various European countries.