Freight car components: the innovators - includes related article on electro-pneumatic braking - Cover Story

Railway Age, Feb, 1996 by Gus Welty

Experimental use of composite materials has been referred to a couple of times--Standard Car Truck and Lockheed working on a freight car truck, Brenco with a roller bearing cage.

Nobody should be surprised: High-strength composites are out there, in boxcar doors and load dividers, soon in autorack end doors, already in two RBL cars in service on Burlington Northern Santa Fe.

One company that has dealt in composite materials since its founding is ZefTek. One of many products made of what used to be called "plastic" is the company's self locking coupler knuckle pivot pin. This pin weighs 12 ounces, and according to ZefTek, out of more than 40,000 pins installed in the last five years, fewer than 100 have failed; that compares with a failure rate that's much higher for steel pins.

ZefTek also has a brake beam guide made of a specially formulated plastic that has been tested both by TTX and by a major electric utility. How confident is the supplier of this product? It's offering a guarantee against defects in material and workmanship for one million miles or 10 years, whichever comes first, and it's further guaranteeing that in that mileage/time 100% of the brake beam's contact surface will be free of wall voids, there will be no holes caused by dishing through material loss, and rotation will not be needed after 500,000 miles.

What comes to the fore, strongly, in talking with component suppliers is that they have all gotten the message as regards quality. The question remains: Where and when and if the demanded "quality" carries an additional price, will the railroads pay for it?

Electro-pneumatic braking comes front and center

No explosion of technology has come so quickly as the one that has brought development of electro-pneumatic braking systems to the forefront.

At this point, TSM seems to have a clear lead in terms of systems out there for test, tests that have proved successful in every instance thus far. TSM's EABS system went first to Union Pacific, for test on Thrall-built TTX intermodal well cars between Chicago and Los Angeles.

Locomotive engineers loved the capabilities of e-p braking. In a series of tests, there were only three component failures, none of them vital and all easily corrected. Then, the TTX cars were to go into test on Southern Pacific.

In the meantime, TSM EABS began testing on Gunderson-built cars over Burlington Northern Santa Fe, between Chicago and Los Angeles and between Chicago and the Pacific Northwest; if there had been any concerns about performance in extreme cold, they were allayed in tests over the northern route in January.

TSM ran its first e-p system tests on a BN coal train in southern Illinois, and that's where New York Air Brake has tested the system it acquired last year from Duluth and Iron Range Co. NYAB expects to have another test train, with an improved system, in service by late summer, a design that can work as standalone or overlay.

At this point, NYAB--like other suppliers--doesn't know whether the eventual choice will be wired or wireless technology. It plans to be prepared for both or either, and in the meantime it's looking at research and development on other railcar "nice to know" information, such as hot bearing detection.