Mansell's wooden disc wheel
The Mansell wooden disc wheel , or Mansell wheel, is a railway wheel that was patented by Richard Mansell , Carriage and Wagon Superintendent of the English South Eastern Railway .
history
The design dates from the 1840s and was widely used in British railroad passenger cars. The composite wheel is constructed like the wheels of artillery guns, but with a solid wooden core composed of wedges instead of spokes.
Wood was used to reduce the noise caused mainly at the rail joints. A wooden disc muffled the noise from conventional train wheels. It was made of teak in a star shape and had a long lifespan. In addition to the noise reduction, there was an increased safety factor. This may be due in part to the special attention paid to the wooden disc wheels on passenger cars, but also to the lack of the effects of casting defects. The wooden disks were electrical insulators so that the Mansell wheels could not operate the track circuits used in railway signaling technology. However, this problem was solved by using a copper conductor on the wheels.
The main disadvantage of the wooden disc wheels was that the wooden discs had to be put together from different parts, so that over time the wheels often became loose and damaged, plus the unpleasant fact that the wood shrinks when the heat is high, while the wheel tires are expands at the same time, and vice versa in wet and cold weather in winter the wood swells and takes on larger dimensions, while the wheel tire contracts. Apart from this unpleasant feature, the wooden wheels have proven themselves well. In the United States, however, they were replaced by Allen's paper wagon wheels , particularly in Pullman sleeping and dining cars .
Mansell's wooden disc wheels were used almost exclusively in passenger cars, but there are also applications in tank locomotives . The 0-4-2WT Supports Locomotive Gazelle of Shropshire and Montgomeryshire Railway has a dolly with Mansell'schen wooden disc wheels. The locomotive is on display at the Colonel Stephens Railway Museum on the Kent and East Sussex Railway . The 4-4-0 steam locomotives of the Duke class (3252 class) of the Great Western Railway from 1895 had such wheels for the two-axle predecessor bogie and the tender.
Reuse the wooden segments
The wooden segments of the wheels had a shorter life expectancy than other parts and therefore had to be replaced at regular intervals, mostly because they had loosened in the rim and not because of other damage. The valuable teak was often reused for other purposes. Because the wooden segments were too short for most woodworking applications, they were often used as parquet-like flooring, especially outside train stations, near milk can ramps and on post office platforms. The wooden flooring muffled the noise of milk cans or iron-tired wagons placed on it at night. One such pavement is still preserved in Edge Hill train station in Liverpool .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ S. Warner: The design and construction of carriages and wagons. In: Railway Mechanical Engineering , a practical treatise by engineering experts, Volume 1. the Gresham Publishing Company Ltd. London, 1923.
- ↑ Fig. 21. In: Zeitschrift, Volume 11, Österreichischer Ingenieur- und Architekten-Verein, Springer, 1859.
- ^ CF Dendy Marshall: History of the Southern Railway . Ian Allan, 1963, ISBN 0-7110-0059-X .
- ↑ Müller-Melchiors: Notes from the world exhibition in Philadelphia 1876: 79. Railway carriage wheels with paper filling. In: Polytechnisches Journal . 224, 1877, pp. 121-128.
- ↑ Railway wagon wheels made of paper. In: Polytechnisches Journal . 242, 1881, Miszelle 5, pp. 68-69.
- ↑ GA Sekon, The Evolution of the Steam Locomotive , The Railway Publishing Company Ltd., 1899