Re: Tasrail ZR2 adhesion

["STANLEY J. MITCHELL" <mitchell@gold.net.au>]

When the wheels of a loco slip in power the wheels usually spin very fast.
By applying a very small amount of loco brake to the loco wheels, this
slippage tends to be stopped. In effect one is powering against a brake, in
this case the engines own brake. In principle it works very well. The
English Electric loco used this method of controlling wheel slip.
Unfortunately in the west some drivers also used it to control the speed of
a train down hill and so it was disabled.
Hope this sheds some light on this matter.
It is an interesting point to note that once our new age loco when the
engine has reached 11 km/h the driver can no longer manually apply sand to
the rail to prevent wheel slip occurring. Now every driver knows that under
certain conditions in certain places an engine is almost guaranteed to
slip. But the manufacturers of the modern engine, in their infinite wisdom,
have decided that the driver knows nothing about controlling trains and so
have employed a fancy computer to do this for him. Now aren't that just a
bunch of clever little dicky birds. Why they don't talk to drivers beats
me. But then, I am only a driver !!
Stan

David <DAVID@NMIT.EDU.VIC.AU> wrote in article
<3423683B.76A@NMIT.EDU.VIC.AU>...
> John Duncan McCallum wrote:
> > >
> > >"Initially the adhesion of the loco wheels to the rails is to be
> > >assisted by the action of friction blocks onto the treads of each
> > >wheel to control wheelslip, rather than by using sand."
> but applying friction to the wheel treads
> > >does seem to me to be a little strange.