[PRCo] Re: Re :Fineview PCCs

[Fred Schneider]

Leverage of car moving backward.   For some reason, while you and I would expect the frame on which they are mounted to lift straight up with the shoes remaining tangent to the rail, they didn't.   

The downhill (rear end of the car) end of the shoe simply behaved, Boris, like it was dug into the rail and the front lifted off the rail.   Perhaps, and you know we don't always look for what the obscure cause is when we are 18 years old, but perhaps the rear of the shoe or the the frame was locked against a raised rail joint or wedged against a paving block so that as the car rolled backward, the shoe dug into the adjacent rail or block, and front lifted because the magnetic attraction was insufficient to overcome the rolling force of the car. 

I only remember what I saw in 1958.   I didn't test it with an engineering mind then because it didn't make perfect sense.   When you are 18 and right out of high school there are a lot of things you see to which you fail to test with reason.  I didn't have the wisdom then to realize it didn't make perfect sense.   If I had, I would have probably looked to see what the shoe was butting up against.  

Make sense Boris?

fws


On Feb 17, 2012, at 3:14 PM, Boris Cefer wrote:

> Please, tell me, what lifted the track brake shoes off the rail!
> 
> B
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Fred Schneider" <fwschneider at comcast.net>
> To: <pittsburgh-railways at dementix.org>
> Sent: Friday, February 17, 2012 4:39 PM
> Subject: [PRCo] Re: Re :Fineview PCCs
> 
> 
> The company did not seem to worry about what they put on FINEVIEW on 
> fantrips.   I personally scheduled a fantrip using 1707.   Believe me, it 
> was not suited.   The drum brakes would not hold it on Henderson Street and 
> the grade was so steep that the track brake shoes lifted off the rail at at 
> angle of several degrees.   But we got over the line.   The also ran 1700s 
> over Arlington Avenue as the tunnel bypass and that was a little crazy but 
> that may have only been in the PAT days.
> 
> Point is, PRC had a rational plan.   Yes it was not perfectly consistent 
> over time because it could not be.  When you close barns and move cars 
> because you are contracting operations, there is no way the plan can be 
> preserved.
> 
> 
>