Wheel-rail system
The wheel-rail system is a transport system in which vehicles with wheels on rails run. This includes railways , subways and trams , while people movers , unless they travel on rails , are not included.
precursor
The forerunners of today's rail systems were ruts in ancient streets that made it easier to keep heavy vehicles in the direction of travel. Such tracks have been found in quarries in the ancient Egyptian Empire and among the Greeks . Probably the most ancient by far longest Rillenweg was the 6-8.5 km long Schiffkarrenweg Diolkos across the Isthmus of Corinth ( Greece ). The highly developed Roman master builders also worked grooves out of the paved surface on numerous Roman roads .
At the turn of the late Middle Ages and early modern times, wooden tracks were laid in mines to move heavy loads. Georgius Agricola documents this in his work De re metallica from 1556.
Early developments in the railroad
Rail technology was further developed in the course of the 18th century. Soon the wooden longitudinal planks were covered with flat iron strips to reduce wear and tear and drag.
From 1770 cast-iron rails were laid on stone blocks, for the first time on the Derby Canal Railway in England. The Englishman Ralph Allen invented the one-sided wheel flange in the 1730s, which guides the car safely on the track. According to other sources, the wheel flange was not introduced until 1789.
With the introduction of the flange wheels, rails with a mushroom-shaped cross-section with and without a lower reinforcement of the web were used. The short, cast-iron rails could only form a very poor track, unsuitable for larger wheel pressures (as required by the locomotives in the making). In 1820, John Berkinshaw in Durham succeeded in producing rails by rolling, thus making them from unevenly more durable material and in great lengths (then 15 feet).
“The cross-sectional shape initially remained the same mushroom shape u. the support also the same with cast iron chairs on stone cubes. Strangely enough, it was believed not to be allowed to deviate from the fish-belly shape in the longitudinal direction and rolled the corrugated rail with great effort. These rolled rails were first laid on part of the small Stocton-Darlington [sic!] Railway (1825) and on the first large locomotive railway, Liverpool-Manchester (1826–30). "
Today's railway wheels are usually made of steel and have flanges , the rails are mostly Vignol rails or grooved rails . The dynamic behavior of this system is characterized by the sine curve .
See also
literature
- Rainer Schach, Peter Jehle, René Naumann: Transrapid and wheel-rail high-speed railways / A comprehensive system comparison . Springer, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-540-28334-8 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Ralf Roman Rossberg : History of the Railway . Sigloch Edition, Künzelsau 1999, ISBN 3-89393-174-0 , pp. 9, 10
- ^ Ralf Roman Rossberg : History of the Railway . Sigloch Edition, Künzelsau 1999, ISBN 3-89393-174-0 , p. 10ff.
- ↑ a b c Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon , 6th edition 1905–1909