โ Scribed by R.H.O.
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The New York Air Brake Company.-On July I, 1940, The New York Air Brake Company was fifty years old. During its span of life and that of its predecessor, the Eames Vacuum Brake Company, men have learned to control with safety the movement of railroad trains.
Without that control, built up through the years of experiment and experience, the science of modern transportation as we know it would not have been possible.
Abraham Lincoln rode on railroad trains the safety of which depended upon the anticipation and muscle power of brakemen turning hand brakes on car platforms.
Until 1880, railroad men scarcely considered the possibility of applying automatic brakes to freight cars.
Yet today one is safer on a railroad train than in his own home.
The story of air brakes and what they do has been obscured in the emphasis placed upon speed and equipment design in recent years, but were it not for advances in the art of air braking, the present day IOO mile per hour passenger schedules and 150 car freight trains would not be actualities on the country's railroads.
A beautiful brochure published in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the New York Air Brake Company sketches in some detail the development through the years.
Few of the passengers whose safety is maintained by air brakes or shippers whose goods are delivered without damage realize how complex and yet how reliable an air brake is. The intricate mechanism of the brake is manufactured under conditions of great precision, for the combined capacity of brakes on a train often represents 15 to 20 times the tractive power of the locomotive.
The successive actuation of brakes on cars as the compressed air flowed through the pipe from the engineer's control valve was slow in the early stages of brake development.
Now it is so fast that it approaches the speed of sound, and on some modern passenger trains brakes are actuated instantaneously from the engineer's cab by electrical transmission.
Brake design has had to shorten progressively the retardation cycle in relation to the work to be done, otherwise the enormous gain in railroad locomotive power and train momentum would have prolonged that cycle intolerably.
R. H. 0.
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