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| Re: Silverliner V problems (1400900) | |||
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Re: Silverliner V problems |
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Posted by Bill West on Tue Jul 5 01:16:10 2016, in response to Re: issues with rail car's trucks; Re: Silverliner V problems, posted by Olog-hai on Mon Jul 4 22:44:32 2016. Let's sort out some bits here.On Columbus's side: -the trouble took 5 years to show, it showed on virtually all of the cars and it is slow cracks. That's fatigue as has been mentioned. -The design is sound as it has been successfully used for many years. -120 cars were delivered over about 3 years, that's 3-4 pairs of trucks per month so they were likely made in many batches. -the wide failure over many batches of an established design rules out random troubles with steel composition, pouring and heat treating. -the welding on of the pad over the journal is a ripe opportunity for failure of a tension stressed equalizer. But it would have to be one welder, doing all of them, and not following the weld type, penetration and length in the drawing. 20-30 batch inspections would have caught that. -if someone with good intent had initiated a change to the design of the weld starting with this batch however then that is a risk point and will come out when Columbus's detailed drawings are examined. On Hyundai's side: I have noticed several SV passengers' comments about bad ride qualities, especially at speed. That opens the question of car length, wheelbase, weight, spring size, suspension design/damping and the flexing/resonant characteristics of the car body. Any problem with these could result in prematurely reaching the equalizer's fatigue life, something that rough ride's vibrations would be very suggestive of. All things that are back in Hyundai's ballpark...., in the words of Arte Johnson "very interesting". I coincidently looked up Amtrak's SDP40F a few days ago. Despite EMD's long expertise these were a derailment disaster, to the point that some roads banned them. But now I read that the FRA resolved several years later that the actual problem was the resonance of lightweight baggage cars behind the SD's. Hence I am now slow to point at Columbus yet, they too have a long good history through GSI/Baldwin and through their own Buckeye trucks. Bill |
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