Paper car wheels were composite wheels of railway carriages, made from a wrought iron or steel rim bolted to an iron hub with an interlayer of laminated paper. [1] The center was made of compressed paper held between two plate-iron disks. [2] Their ability to dampen rail/wheel noise resulted in a quiet and smooth ride for the passengers of North American Pullman dining and sleeping cars. [3]
Paper car wheels were invented by the locomotive engineer Richard N. Allen (1827–1890), [4] who set up a company with his brother-in-law in 1867, producing paper from straw. They dampened vibrations much better than conventional cast-iron railway wheels, which transmitted all imperfections of the track into the car above it, making train rides noisy and uncomfortable. [1] Paper wheels were especially used in Pullman dining and sleeping cars, which were built, and operated by Pullman, to give passengers in these cars a quieter, vibration-free ride. [5] [6] Due to the composite construction, the wheels would fail faster than the all-metal wheels, which caused derailments. In 1915, the Interstate Commerce Commission, which regulated U.S. railroads, declared paper car wheels to be unsafe, and they went out of use on railroad passenger cars in the United States. [3]
The construction process involved the bonding of 200 circular sheets of paper, as follows. Sets of three circular sheets were bonded into a "sandwich" using a flour-based glue. Additional "sandwiches" were then constructed and placed atop one another to make a 4-foot (1.2 m) high stack. This stack was placed in a 650-ton hydraulic press for three hours. [3] The circular compound disks were then dried and cured for six to eight weeks, leaving no moisture in them. After curing, the compound disks were turned in a lathe to the appropriate size, and 24 or more bolt holes were drilled in them. These compound disks formed the center of each wheel, to which was added a cast-iron hub and steel rim bolted to 1⁄4-inch (6.4 mm) thick protective metal plates on either side of the paper center. With the bolts tightened, the paper center became a "solid, dense, compressed, composite structure" which could support the weight of the carriages. [7]
The Allen Paper Car Wheel Works was initially based on East North Street in Morris, Illinois, while its general office was on 239 Broadway, New York. The company's principal customer was the Pullman Palace Car Company in Chicago which, after testing and optimising the wheel, had placed their first order for 100 wheels in 1871. Subsequently, the main plant was established at South Bay in Hudson, New York, in 1873, and eventually relocated onto the site of Pullman's Chicago works. [8]
By 1881, the Allen Paper Car Wheel Co. operated workshops in New York and Chicago, but maintained its processing plant in Morris. [8] Each workshop employed approximately 80 men and produced more than 24 wheels a day. [3] Thus, the company produced and sold thousands of wheels each year. [8] In 1886, the company announced it had 60,000 wheels in service, and by 1893 it had sold 115,000. [4] The Allen Paper Car Wheel Works operated until 1890, when they were transferred to John N. Bunnell and changed their name to the American Straw Board Co. Subsequently, the business and plant were leased, sold and restructured, and operated for the next two decades under different names, including the Morris Box Board Co. In October 1915, the company was restructured and incorporated as the Morris Paper Mills. By the 1920s, the paper mill was one of the largest employers in Morris, producing cardboard boxes of various shapes, sizes, and colors that were shipped throughout the US. [8]
The company John Brown & Co in Sheffield, England, came to an agreement with the inventor on the manufacture of paper wheels in Europe. It installed the necessary machines by October 1875, so that production was expected to start in due course. [9]
As proposed by the Master Machine Builder Finckbein in Saarbrücken-St. Johann and the Master Craftsman Caesar of the Reichseisenbahn, the oilboard and lacquerware factory of Gebrüder Adt in Forbach produced a paper pulp suitable for railway car wheels after various tests. With the permission of the Royal Railway Administration in Frankfurt a. M., wheelsets with paper discs were manufactured in the main railway workshop in Saarbrücken and in the railway car wheels factory of the van der Zypen brothers in Deutz and then put into use. Such wheelsets with paper pulp discs were in regular service on wagons for a long time. They held perfectly and showed a very smooth running while driving without making any annoying noises. [10]
The wheels used in Saarbrücken were constructed in the manner of wooden Mansell wheels, with the wheel tire being placed on the paper disc and the hub in it by means of strong hydraulic pressure, while the tires of the American paper wheels were provided with an inner attachment against which the paper disc was pressed and to which it was connected by bolts. Practice has shown that tires with such an inner approach, apparently due to the uneven mass distribution, cracked from the inside to the outside, so that the advantage of reinforcing the tires was lost and an opposite result was achieved. The tire in conventional Mansell wheels with wooden discs could slip on the wooden disc when the tire was warmed up during braking. In the wheels designed in Saarbrücken, four iron dowels were therefore inserted on each side between the tire and the Mansell ring, which prevented the wheel tires from turning during braking. [10]
A bogie is a chassis or framework that carries a wheelset, attached to a vehicle—a modular subassembly of wheels and axles. Bogies take various forms in various modes of transport. A bogie may remain normally attached or be quickly detachable. It may include a suspension component within it, or be solid and in turn be suspended ; it may be mounted on a swivel, as traditionally on a railway carriage or locomotive, additionally jointed and sprung, or held in place by other means.
A wheel is a rotating component that is intended to turn on an axle bearing. The wheel is one of the key components of the wheel and axle which is one of the six simple machines. Wheels, in conjunction with axles, allow heavy objects to be moved easily facilitating movement or transportation while supporting a load, or performing labor in machines. Wheels are also used for other purposes, such as a ship's wheel, steering wheel, potter's wheel, and flywheel.
A disc brake is a type of brake that uses the calipers to squeeze pairs of pads against a disc or a rotor to create friction. There are two basic types of brake pad friction mechanisms: abrasive friction and adherent friction. This action slows the rotation of a shaft, such as a vehicle axle, either to reduce its rotational speed or to hold it stationary. The energy of motion is converted into heat, which must be dispersed.
Morris is a city in and the county seat of Grundy County, Illinois, United States and part of the southwest Chicago metropolitan area. The population was estimated at 15,053 in 2019.
An axle or axletree is a central shaft for a rotating wheel or gear. On wheeled vehicles, the axle may be fixed to the wheels, rotating with them, or fixed to the vehicle, with the wheels rotating around the axle. In the former case, bearings or bushings are provided at the mounting points where the axle is supported. In the latter case, a bearing or bushing sits inside a central hole in the wheel to allow the wheel or gear to rotate around the axle. Sometimes, especially on bicycles, the latter type of axle is referred to as a spindle.
A bicycle wheel is a wheel, most commonly a wire wheel, designed for a bicycle. A pair is often called a wheelset, especially in the context of ready built "off the shelf" performance-oriented wheels.
The Pullman Company, founded by George Pullman, was a manufacturer of railroad cars in the mid-to-late 19th century through the first half of the 20th century, during the boom of railroads in the United States. Through rapid late-19th century development of mass production and takeover of rivals, the company developed a virtual monopoly on production and ownership of sleeper cars.
Rail transport terms are a form of technical terminology applied to railways. Although many terms are uniform across different nations and companies, they are by no means universal, with differences often originating from parallel development of rail transport systems in different parts of the world, and in the national origins of the engineers and managers who built the inaugural rail infrastructure. An example is the term railroad, used in North America, and railway, generally used in English-speaking countries outside North America and by the International Union of Railways. In English-speaking countries outside the United Kingdom, a mixture of US and UK terms may exist.
A wheelwright is a craftsman who builds or repairs wooden wheels. The word is the combination of "wheel" and the word "wright" as in shipwright and arkwright. This occupational name became the English surname Wright. It also appears in surnames like Cartwright and Wainwright. It corresponds with skilful metal workers being called Smith.
A velocipede is a human-powered land vehicle with one or more wheels. The most common type of velocipede today is the bicycle.
Zipp is an American company that is best known for designing, manufacturing, and marketing carbon-composite bicycle wheels for road cycling, triathlons, track racing, and mountain biking. The company's product range also includes handlebars, stems, seat posts, tires, inner tubes, handlebar tape, and bags.
The rim is the "outer edge of a wheel, holding the tire". It makes up the outer circular design of the wheel on which the inside edge of the tire is mounted on vehicles such as automobiles. For example, on a bicycle wheel the rim is a large hoop attached to the outer ends of the spokes of the wheel that holds the tire and tube. In cross-section, the rim is deep in the center and shallow at the outer edges, thus forming a "U" shape that supports the bead of the tire casing.
The artillery wheel was a nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century style of wagon, gun carriage, and automobile wheel. Rather than having its spokes mortised into a wooden nave (hub), it has them fitted together in a keystone fashion with miter joints, bolted into a two-piece metal nave. Its tyre is shrunk onto the rim in the usual way, but it may also be bolted on for security.
Wire wheels, wire-spoked wheels, tension-spoked wheels, or "suspension" wheels are wheels whose rims connect to their hubs by wire spokes. Although these wires are considerably stiffer than a similar diameter wire rope, they function mechanically the same as tensioned flexible wires, keeping the rim true while supporting applied loads. The term suspension wheel should not be confused with vehicle suspension.
The Mansell Wheel is a railway wheel patented by Richard Mansell, the Carriage and Wagon superintendent of the South Eastern Railway in the UK. The design was created in the 1840s and was eventually used widely on passenger railway stock in the UK. It is an interesting example of a composite wooden wheel, using the same principle as an artillery wheel but with a solid wooden centre instead of spokes. The drawing (right) is from a railway design book of the early 20th century.
A wheelset is a pair of railroad vehicle wheels mounted rigidly on an axle such that both wheels rotate in unison. Wheelsets are often mounted in a bogie – a pivoted frame assembly holding at least two wheelsets – at each end of the vehicle. Most modern freight cars and passenger cars have bogies each with two wheelsets, but three wheelsets are used in bogies of freight cars that carry heavy loads, and three-wheelset bogies are under some passenger cars. Four-wheeled goods wagons that were once near-universal in Europe and Great Britain and their colonies have only two wheelsets; in recent decades such vehicles have become less common as trainloads have become heavier.
Asa Whitney was an American manufacturer, inventor, railroad executive and politician.
A train wheel or rail wheel is a type of wheel specially designed for use on railway tracks. The wheel acts as a rolling component, typically press fitted onto an axle and mounted directly on a railway carriage or locomotive, or indirectly on a bogie, also called a truck. The powered wheels under the locomotive are called driving wheels. Wheels are initially cast or forged and then heat-treated to have a specific hardness. New wheels are machined using a lathe to a standardized shape, called a profile, before being installed onto an axle. All wheel profiles are regularly checked to ensure proper interaction between the wheel and the rail. Incorrectly profiled wheels and worn wheels can increase rolling resistance, reduce energy efficiency and may even cause a derailment. The International Union of Railways has defined a standard wheel diameter of 920 mm (36 in), although smaller sizes are used in some rapid transit railway systems and on ro-ro carriages.
Motorcyclewheels are made to cope with radial and axial forces. They also provide a way of mounting other critical components such as the brakes, final drive and suspension. Wheels, and anything directly connected to them, are considered to be unsprung mass. Traditionally motorcycles used wire-spoked wheels with inner tubes and pneumatic tyres. Although cast wheels were first used on a motorcycle in 1927, it would not be until the 1970s that mainstream manufacturers would start to introduce cast wheels on their roadgoing motorcycles. Spoked wheels are usually made using steel spokes with steel or aluminium rims. Cast wheels are predominantly made from an aluminium-alloy, but can also be made from more-exotic materials, such as magnesium content alloy or carbon fibre.