[PRCo] Re: Car 3556

[Fred Schneider]

Yes.   Until the late 1920s it was customary to place a small pinion  
on the motor shaft to drive a bull gear on the axle.   That was  
housed in a sheet steel box and periodically greased.   The life of  
the pinion was only about 60,000 miles.  The bull gear was  
proportionately longer depending on the number of teeth.   The short  
life was related to lubrication problems.    You put grease on the  
gears but centrifugal force removed the grease to the inside of the  
gear case.

By the late 1920s the industry began experimenting with sealed gear  
boxes using worm, helical or herringbone (doule helix) and hypoid  
gears running in an oil bath.   Worm gears were generally not  
satisfactory because of clearance issues.   Hypoid gears were quite  
satisfactory and were used on all the PCC cars.   Westinghouse Nuttal  
(WN used double reduction units.   One example is West Penn 832 at  
PTM.    I doubt that anyone is not using sealed units today.  Once  
the pinions were sealed in an oil bath, they generally lasted  
hundreds of thousands of miles.   The only longevity problems I ever  
encountered were the gearboxes on the Brilliners, particularly in  
Atlantic City where they had a bad habit of continually ingesting  
beach sand on private right-of-way.   Baltimore and Cincinnati also  
had problems with those gearboxes and Cincinnati solved the problem  
by putting Clark B2 PCC trucks under its one Brilliner.

On Nov 1, 2007, at 6:35 PM, ROBERT R ROCKWELL wrote:

> I am wondering where this gearing was done ? A gear directly on the  
> motor shaft to one directly on the axle in an enclosure maybe ?
> Robert Rockwell
> w3syt1 at msn.com<mailto:w3syt1 at msn.com>
>   ----- Original Message -----
>   From: Fred Schneider<mailto:fwschneider at comcast.net>
>   To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org<mailto:pittsburgh- 
> railways at dementia.org>
>   Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2007 6:00 PM
>   Subject: [PRCo] Re: Car 3556
>
>
>>> reservoirs. The car originally 4 No. 247 motors with a >>gear  
>>> ratio of
>>> 18:47,
>