And the airbrake? In widespread use for 20 years on passenger cars before mandated adoption on freight cars. Why such a long delay? If not for the mandate, one wonders how many more years it would have taken? But as it turned out, adoption, though initially costly, saved a lot of labor and allowed for longer trains. Short-sighted management?
C&NW, CA&E, MILW, CGW and IC fan
schlimm And the airbrake? In widespread use for 20 years on passenger cars before mandated adoption on freight cars. Why such a long delay?
And the airbrake? In widespread use for 20 years on passenger cars before mandated adoption on freight cars. Why such a long delay?
I don't know about the air brake mandate. But both the coupler and air brake conversions were complicated by the need to maintain car compatibilty and use both the old and the new on the same trains during the changeover.
This has always been a problem with interchageability standards in widespread use. There was also a considerable risk in getting ahead of the natural pace in making a committment to adopt a certain version of these improvements because a better mousetrap might win out, and leave your attempt to get ahead of the game as being an expensive mistake. Whatever invention won the contest required eveyone to adopt it. So it was very risky to try to get too far out in front.
There is another reason to conclude that the coupler mandate may not have been necessary to complete the conversion within seven years. By the time of the 1893 mandate, the 20% conversion was possibly sufficient to propel the industry forward to completion as quickly as possible. The reason this may have been the case was that the conversion phase required coupling MCB couplers to link and pin couplers, which caused more accidents and delays than the most dangerous period of the link and pin phase. So once they had a sufficient number of cars converted, this mating of the differing coupler types grew into a formidable problem, creating a strong incentive to get the conversion job done.
schlimm And the airbrake? In widespread use for 20 years on passenger cars before mandated adoption on freight cars. Why such a long delay? .... But as it turned out, adoption, though initially costly, saved a lot of labor and allowed for longer trains.
And the airbrake? In widespread use for 20 years on passenger cars before mandated adoption on freight cars. Why such a long delay? .... But as it turned out, adoption, though initially costly, saved a lot of labor and allowed for longer trains.
The difference was probably at least partly due to the speeds of the two types of trains. Many passenger trains were fast, sometimes even faster than today, while the freights mostly plodded along. The traditional "100-mile day" that formed the basis for train crew wages, if converted to an 8 hour day, matches an average speed of 12.5 mph. The faster the speed, the more important it is to have fast acting brakes. I suggest early application to passenger equipment and locomotives was much easier to justify to management of the time, especially when the fleet was semi-captive and far smaller than the freight car roster.
Air brakes certainly allowed for longer trains, but length was also constrained by the small locomotives of the era.
John
I don't think the passenger trains of the 1890's were faster generally than those of today. If they were, it is a sad commentary on 120 years of railroading progress. An example of fast back then was the ATSF California Ltd, which took only 60 hours in 1892, Chicago to LA..
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