Project: Kijfhoek

Freight wagons without their own brakes come to a halt at the bottom of the sorting hill at the Kijfhoek railway yard with a brake shoe. At least if the brake shoe is in the right position. Syracuse recently tested various scenarios for ProRail for using the slip.

Rolling on

Safety first

With the rolling tests we collect data on various factors that determine braking and rolling distances, such as frictional forces, rolling resistance and the position of the track. We use this data to refine simulation models. Michiel: ”It is good to test models regularly. This way you will not be faced with any surprises in practice and it provides data with which we can reconstruct certain situations. Safety comes first.”

Knocked off the track

Wirth the failure tests we looked at what can happen if a so called ‘brake shoe’ is placed incorrectly on the track. “What we expected happened,” says Michiel. “In that specific situation, the brake shoes were hit and knocked out of the track or broke and were no longer usable. They were then no longer able to provide the necessary braking or blocking function.”

Museum track

The testing took place in Stadskanaal, on a railway yard of the STAR museum railway line. There – under controlled and representative conditions – experiments could be conducted freely without it becoming unsafe.

Source: ProRail