At 18:10 13/10/99 -0400, you wrote:
>At 12:23 PM 10/12/99 -0700, you wrote:
>>actuating the air brakes. Electropneumatic air brakes have been a dream of
>>RR people for years. If you have a mile long freight and you open the train
>>pipe
>>that runs the length of the train, it'll take some time (during which the
>>train is bearing
>>down on a school bus) to empty the air from the rear car.
>>Unfortunately, the difficulty of making a reliable electrical connection
>>that won't
>>be a maintainence nightmare for the approximately one million RR cars out
>>there
>>has proved beyond solution.
>>
>
>
>This is going to sound like a really odd idea, but I will throw it out
>there anyway ;-)
>
>I always wondered why no-one tried (or maybe they have?) to develop some
>kind of breaking system for RR cars that didn't depend on the wheels (for
>example, solid-fuel rocket motor) that could be used in an extreme
>emergency to stop the train QUICKLY. I realize that this is changing the
>subject slightly from the safety concern you mentioned, but it made me
>think of it.
>

HUMM,
Would this device be at the front or the rear of the train?

Lets see at the front.
KABOOM rocet fires, driver is thrown back, through the bulkhead an onto the
diesel, where he obtains 2nd and third degree burns. The train was
travelling at 50MPH, with the front on a flat and the rear coming down a
hill. The engine starts to shove other carrages back, the resulting
intertia casues the carrages to de-rail, these lay accross the tracks
infront of a high speed intercirty express carrying 2000 passanges, losts
of dead people = states greatest rail disarster.

On the rear of the train.
The train is long, and has come over the crest of a hill (1/2 the train on
each side). The emergency brakes and firing of the rocket causes the train
to break apart of the the crest (This happens now, with incorrect breaing
on trains 1 mile long (We run the longest trains in the world here in
Western Australia, at Mount Tom Price). The back part of the train takes
off in the oppersite direction and slams into a stationary train waiting at
the previous signal block, more people dead.
Meanwhile at the front of the broken train, the driver has been slung up
against the screen during the jolt that occured while the slack was being
taken up.

All nasty


Dennis




>Sean
>
>|
>| Sean Breheny
>| Amateur Radio Callsign: KA3YXM
>| Electrical Engineering Student
>\--------------=----------------
>Save lives, please look at http://www.all.org
>Personal page: http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/shb7
>mailto:shb7@cornell.edu ICQ #: 3329174
>
>