Continuous railway brakes Author:Michael Reynolds Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: may appear, work was suspended and the trains did not run when the rails were wet and slippery ; so that it was all sunshine work, barring accidents. Sometimes h... more »orses were required to check the velocity of the waggons, but the momentum overpowering them, they were almost sure to fall, and horse and man were frequently killed outright, or left maimed for the remainder of their lives, by being dragged down the declivity or incline. To prevent such accidents, and to utilise the periods of time lost by slippery rails, Mr. Le Caan, of Llanelly, in Carmarthenshire, constructed a brake of great simplicity, which, at the time he exhibited it, was attached to a common cart used upon rails. This brake was afterwards applied for checking or stopping carriages under the circumstances already Fig. 1.—Lc Caan-s Brake. mentioned, and was very successful in its application. It was described before the Society of Arts in 1801, and received the notice which is generally accorded to original inventions. The brake is illustrated by Fig. 1. a represents the brake-block, which, let it be particularly noticed, was of cast-iron, not of wood, pressing against an iron tyre ; the block was made a little broader than the tyre of the wheel, so that the wear should be equalised across the whole of the tread, and it covered half the circumference of the wheel. The top of the brake turned upon a pivot, b, fixed over the centre of the wheel. The lower part was connected by a strong chain, c, tothe shaft d, which was jointed at e to the frame of the cart or waggon. When the horse was upon his legs, the shaft, chain, and brake were in the several positions shown by the dotted lines at /, g, b, the brake being then quite clear of the wheels, as well as the rails. When the horse falls—these are the inventor-...« less