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Freight Car Brake Adjustment
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For a period of time many years ago I was an assistant trainmaster on a freight railroad that serviced the US Steel mills in the Pittsburgh area. I recall that every day our car department inspected about 25% of the hoppers that came through one blast furnace plant after these cars were emptied of iron ore or coke, repairing safety defects like bent sill stirrups & grab irons, etc. I also remember the car folks replacing the brake shoes on some hoppers because these shoes were worn beyond acceptable limits. <br /> <br />I know that these hoppers had adjustment "holes" in their brake levers & rigging so that as their brake shoes wore down from use, the brake rigging could be adjusted to compensate for this wear, allowing acceptable braking force to be maintained during the life of the brake shoes. However, I don't remember the car knockers EVER having to change or "back off" any adjustments in the brake rigging to replace a worn shoe with a new one. They seemed to always be able to simply pry the brake shoe back enough from the wheel with a short bar to pull a "key" out of the shoe holder, remove the worn shoe & then put a brand new shoe in its place. <br /> <br />Since it appears we never had to back off the rigging adjustment to put new & thicker shoes in place, I'm led to believe that these brakes were NEVER adjusted to compensate for shoe wear - the rigging was left in its "new shoe" position so replacement didn't require fiddling with the adjustment. This of course means that braking force varied widely in a train of hoppers, as we did not run "unit trains" like is done today. <br /> <br />I've recently read about "automatic slack adjusters" that adjust the brake rigging as the shoes wear to maintain relatively constant braking capability. Are these adjusters required issue on ALL new freight cars, and if so, how long have these been mandated? If not, are they mandated on certain types of cars? And have all "old" (non slack-adjusted equipped) cars of types required to have these been retrofitted? <br /> <br />SBradyR
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