[PRCo] Re: Boston Resilient Wheels

[Fred Schneider]

I'll stick, Boris, with the answers I got from management in he  
organization.

On Feb 13, 2008, at 12:05 PM, Boris Cefer wrote:

> It had political background. Streetcars were undesired in Boston  
> and the
> problem with wheel shunts and incorrectly working track circuits,  
> rather
> imaginary, was used as an excuse for use of solid wheels. Solid  
> wheels were
> noisy and thus an another reason to get rid of streetcars.
>
> B
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Fred Schneider" <fwschneider at comcast.net>
> To: <pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org>
> Sent: Monday, February 11, 2008 7:33 PM
> Subject: [PRCo] Boston Resilient Wheels
>
>
> There was a dialogue going back and forth that I am summarizing here
> regarding the removal of resilient wheels from the Boston PCC cars.
>
> Two close friends, Phil Craig and Russ Jackson filled me in on the
> details.   Rather than cut and pasted paragraphs of commentary, it
> seems what was happening is that the shunts around the resilient
> rubber inserts were failing and thus not shorting out signal
> circuits.   I recall from earlier correspondence that perhaps the
> commonwealth had something to do with forcing the hand of the MBTA
> into solid steel wheels on the PCCs because of the safety issue with
> the PCCs.
>
> Now, why were they failing?   Was it wheel maintenance?   Russ
> pointed out that it had nothing to do with wheels.   It had
> everything to do with sloppy guard rail maintenance that was shearing
> off the the shunts.   He blamed it on the track department.
>
> And now I'm going to delete all those messages.
>
>