[PRCo] Re: 77-54 loses a wheel - whoops.

[Boris Cefer]

The wheels could also disintegrate (by the way, how often did that happen to 
PCCs in the US???), which has been more common with resilient wheels rather 
than a broken axle. By the way, the axle diameter is approximately 3.9" 
where the wheel hub is pressed on.
True, the 1400s came with superresilient wheels (presumably with rubber 
sandwiches of an earlier, thinner type) from St. Louis but after the tires 
wore out many received "standard" resilient wheels or superresilient wheels 
of the standard design. PRCO commonly used to swap the truck in shop 
inspections.
I do not expect newspapers to provide deep details but in this case the 
article does not seem saying what actually happened, or it sounds chaotic.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Schneider Fred" <fwschneider at comcast.net>
To: <pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 9:24 PM
Subject: [PRCo] Re: 77-54 loses a wheel - whoops.


I suspect that newspapers are the same, Boris,

                                throughout most of the world.   They
are there for a non technical audience.  It is expected that the
public does not understand or if we tell them, we will be in trouble
so let's not tell them.

You and I know enough about PCCs that the statement "wheel fell off"
would probably cause either of us to think that a PCC axle is much
smaller than a regular streetcar or railroad car axle.   It doesn't
have to be a 2 inch or 3 inch or 4 inch axle to support weight.
Rather it is a 1 inch (2 1/2 cm) axle because all the weight of the
car (and the body is very light) is supported in a bearing right
behind the wheel.  Unlike a conventional streetcar, the axle has to
handle the torgue but doesn't have a 1500 to 2000 pound motor hanging
on it.

But it doesn't say that there could not be a flaw in the steel of the
axle that caused a crack just outward from the journal bearing.     I
think I would be more likely to believe that would have been the
cause than a fracture of one of the bolts that held the wheel
together.   Remember this was a 1400 and they had super resilient
wheels so there were six or eight bolts that held the wheel in
compression.

Was it abnormal for a railroad car or street railway axle to fail?
No.   There is a great picture taken by Charles Dengler, the
Pittsburgh postal letter carrier who always carried a camera in his
letter bag.   One day he stumbled upon a disabled low floor car on
the North Side on Chestnut Street on the North Side.  We displayed it
at PTM.   A car suffered a broken axle and a shop crew was actually
rebuilding the truck on the street.   When I was going through the
route cards I discovered in an entry showing cars diverted while a
truck was rebuilt due to a broken axle somewhere in Pittsburgh ... it
took about 90 minutes.   Most systems jacked the car onto dolly
trucks and hauled them to a shop to fix them.

What point am I trying to make?   Perhaps that the PCC was going fast
enough when it happened that it aimed for a building and that
resulted in a newspaper reporter to be dispatched.   The actual event
was more common than we might like on a system that ran close to
150,000 car miles a day.

Fred Schneider