At 23:31 13/10/99 -0400, you wrote:
>Hello, John Pfaff?? where are you?
>
>John Pfaff is on this list and works for WABCO, Westinghouse Air Brake, the
>inventor of the air brake (that was George Westinghouse, not John..)
>
>Chime in John!  He knows all of the current industry and existing designs.
>
>I am aware of a design by WABCO that uses the Echelon LON part for an electro
>pneumatic solution.  I am not sure whether they will proceed with it or
not, in
>light of Motorola's unfortunate bailing out. (I'm glad.. I hate the LON).
>
>Chris Eddy
>Pioneer Microsystems, Inc.
>
>

There is such a system running now in Australia where the braking is
electropneumatic. This is on the suburban rail system in Victoria. Lotsa
problems getting this to go and brake evenly as it was implemented as a
disk brake!
Seems that a shaft encoder for each wheel so that the actual rotational
speed, and the current track speed is known. Does work and has been in use
for some 8 years, but expensive to implement on a freight carrage.


Dennis