 Engraving of Prosser Twin Cylinder Freight Car | |
| Industry | Rail transport |
|---|---|
| Founded | late 1870s |
| Defunct | February 26, 1884 |
| Headquarters | , |
| Products | Freight cars |
The Prosser Twin Cylinder Car Company was established in the late 1870s at 129 LaSalle Street, Chicago, Illinois, to manufacture the unique Prosser Twin Cylinder Freight Car. [1] While the concept worked well, the railroad industry would in turn reject the concept [2] and the company went out of business on February 26, 1884. [3]
The Prosser Twin Cylinder freight car was intended to revolutionize the transport of grain by carrying it in two enormous iron cylinders about 8½ feet long and 6½ feet in diameter, each revolving on an axle running through its center, at the ends of which were the journal boxes. Effectively, the car would possess no superstructure, and instead the cargo would be carried inside the car's axles themselves. Steel tires, flanged and fitted to the gauge of track, were put around the cylinders, which served as the wheels of the car. [1] The Westinghouse Air Brake Company developed a system of air brakes specifically for this type of freight car. [4]
The prototype car underwent trials on the CB&Q Railroad, making six round trips of 200 miles each, carrying the grain magnificently and supposedly turning it out at the end of each trip one grade better than when it was first loaded. Railroad personnel were satisfied with it, since there was said to be no trouble in passing curves, frogs and switches. In addition, the car required less lubrication than conventional cars, and experienced significantly less rolling resistance due to a lower dead weight and a lower center of gravity. Due to the extremely large wheel diameter, track wear was reduced. Due to its all-iron construction, the car was even supposedly fireproof. Despite all these advantages, the Prosser Twin Cylinder design was eventually deemed too radical, and was never replicated. [2]
A locomotive or engine is a rail transport vehicle that provides the motive power for a train. If a locomotive is capable of carrying a payload, it is usually rather referred to as a multiple unit, motor coach, railcar or power car; the use of these self-propelled vehicles is increasingly common for passenger trains, but rare for freight trains.
A train is a series of connected vehicles that run along a railway track and transport people or freight. Trains are typically pulled or pushed by locomotives or railcars, though some are self-propelled, such as multiple units. Passengers and cargo are carried in railroad cars, also known as wagons. Trains are designed to a certain gauge, or distance between rails. Most trains operate on steel tracks with steel wheels, the low friction of which makes them more efficient than other forms of transport.
A railway air brake is a railway brake power braking system with compressed air as the operating medium. Modern trains rely upon a fail-safe air brake system that is based upon a design patented by George Westinghouse on April 13, 1869. The Westinghouse Air Brake Company was subsequently organized to manufacture and sell Westinghouse's invention. In various forms, it has been nearly universally adopted.
A steam locomotive is a locomotive that provides the force to move itself and other vehicles by means of the expansion of steam. It is fuelled by burning combustible material to heat water in the locomotive's boiler to the point where it becomes gaseous and its volume increases 1,700 times. Functionally, it is a steam engine on wheels.
A railroad car, railcar, railway wagon, railway carriage, railway truck, railwagon, railcarriage or railtruck, also called a train car, train wagon, train carriage or train truck, is a vehicle used for the carrying of cargo or passengers on a rail transport network. Such cars, when coupled together and hauled by one or more locomotives, form a train. Alternatively, some passenger cars are self-propelled in which case they may be either single railcars or make up multiple units.
The vacuum brake is a braking system employed on trains and introduced in the mid-1860s. A variant, the automatic vacuum brake system, became almost universal in British train equipment and in countries influenced by British practice. Vacuum brakes also enjoyed a brief period of adoption in the United States, primarily on narrow-gauge railroads. Their limitations caused them to be progressively superseded by compressed air systems starting in the United Kingdom from the 1970s onward. The vacuum brake system is now obsolete; it is not in large-scale usage anywhere in the world, other than in South Africa, largely supplanted by air brakes.
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.
Main components found on a typical steam locomotive include:
A railway brake is a type of brake used on the cars of railway trains to enable deceleration, control acceleration (downhill) or to keep them immobile when parked. While the basic principle is similar to that on road vehicle usage, operational features are more complex because of the need to control multiple linked carriages and to be effective on vehicles left without a prime mover. Clasp brakes are one type of brakes historically used on trains.
Rolling resistance, sometimes called rolling friction or rolling drag, is the force resisting the motion when a body rolls on a surface. It is mainly caused by non-elastic effects; that is, not all the energy needed for deformation of the wheel, roadbed, etc., is recovered when the pressure is removed. Two forms of this are hysteresis losses, and permanent (plastic) deformation of the object or the surface. Note that the slippage between the wheel and the surface also results in energy dissipation. Although some researchers have included this term in rolling resistance, some suggest that this dissipation term should be treated separately from rolling resistance because it is due to the applied torque to the wheel and the resultant slip between the wheel and ground, which is called slip loss or slip resistance. In addition, only the so-called slip resistance involves friction, therefore the name "rolling friction" is to an extent a misnomer.
The Meigs Elevated Railway was an experimental but unsuccessful 19th century elevated steam-powered urban rapid transit system, often described as a monorail but technically pre-electric third rail. It was invented in the US by Josiah Vincent Meigs, of Lowell, Massachusetts, and was demonstrated from 1886 to 1894 in a suburb of Boston called East Cambridge.
The Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corporation was founded on September 28, 1869 by George Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Earlier in the year he had invented the railway air brake in New York state.
The New York Air Brake Corporation, located in Watertown, New York, is a manufacturer of air brake and train control systems for the railroad industry worldwide.
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.
Electronically controlled pneumatic brakes are a type of railway braking systems.
The Evansville & Eastern Electric Railway was put into operation on 10 June 1906 was one of the very few electric lines in the United States which did not parallel a steam railroad.
The electric railway of the White Knob Copper Co., Ltd. was operated by the White Knob Copper Co. at White Knob near Mackay, Idaho, in connection with its mines, having 7.1 miles (11.4 km) of railroad, two electric locomotives and 40 ore cars. The difference in level over the seven miles was 2,100 feet (640 m), an average of 6 per cent. Eighty tons of ore were handled by each train.
The Everett–Snohomish Interurban was a 9 miles (14 km) long interurban electric railroad between Everett and Snohomish, Washington. It was inaugurated by the Everett Railway & Electric Co. of Everett, on December 1, 1903.
The Burlington and Northwestern Railway (B&NW) was a 3 ft narrow gauge railroad system in Iowa that operated during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It connected Burlington, Iowa with branches to Washington and Oskaloosa, Iowa. Incorporated in 1875 as the Burlington and Northwestern Narrow Gauge Railway Company, it began carrying traffic in 1876, when it also dropped 'narrow gauge' from its corporate name. The line reached Washington in 1880, operating over 52.5 miles (84.5 km) of track. In 1881, the Burlington and Western Railway Company, a subsidiary of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad (CB&Q) was formed to connect the line to Oskaloosa, completed in 1883. For two decades, both lines were operated as a single system, until on June 20, 1902, the system was widened to standard gauge and the B&NW was adsorbed by the B&W. Later that year, the system was leased to the CB&Q, and in 1903, the entire system was deeded to the CB&Q.
{{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)Book I. Supplement
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