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| Re: How Railroad Could Have Avoided / Ameliorated Fiery Crash (1338892) | |||
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Re: How Railroad Could Have Avoided / Ameliorated Fiery Crash |
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Posted by steamdriven on Sun Feb 8 18:54:48 2015, in response to Re: How Railroad Could Have Avoided / Ameliorated Fiery Crash, posted by ElectricTraction on Sun Feb 8 17:40:33 2015. It's hard to see why people are arguing with you.You could compare braking to starting tractive effort on a loco; for more initial traction they ballast the loco, up to the road's acceptable axle weight. With clean rail (forgetting about rain, leaves etc for the moment) the cf of steel to steel is around 40%. You can't use 100% of that grip because you don't have perfect control over the amount of torque applied to the axle. Braking, same. Friction doesn't care which direction it's working on. That figure doesn't change appreciably according to the weight on the wheel; if the loco weighs 150,000 or 300,000 it has the same coefficient of friction. If train wheels truly do not stick in proportion to increasing axle weight (up to the practical limit) freight trains as configured now wouldn't move. Nobody's going to put brakes on a passenger coach which are both large and sophisticated enough to brake each axle to just short of a slide, detecting and adjusting for wheel slip like a road vehicle with ABS. After all the cost and effort, you'd need to force passengers to sit and be belted in, and they'd still complain, sue, etc. But it's technically possible. |
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