Does anyone know if the hand brakes have just been omitted on the DB and BR passenger stock or do they have some other way of securing them in real life? I’ve searched all over the dopplestock cars inside and out and I haven’t been able to find anything resembling a hand brake.
Aren't they automatically held by the train brake? As soon as air pressure is gone, brakes are applied.
Not necessarily, in North America handbrakes are required on all cars to keep them from moving when not attached to an active locomotive. there was a really bad accident in Canada where a train didn’t have enough applied and rolled away. Now in Germany and the UK I’m not so sure how things work because the freight cars do have them but not passenger.
Didn't they change the system after that accident? Now all brakes need to be actively pressurized to be released and by design they go into emergency if pressure drops, (so if a coupling fails for example the latter half of the train will automatically go into emergency braking), this was adopted in europe after the french commuter train accident as well and it's not too new of a system but I'm not too familiar with the US
i believe that regulation was created in the 50s in the US due to a different accident, but that only works when everything is connected and air is being supplied by the locomotive. A lot of the time when shunting(in yards*)in the US the air brakes aren’t even connected and the engineer just uses the independent brake to stop the train. I just know that enough handbrakes need to be applied when disconnecting the locomotive so that if you tried to pull them with the loco they wouldn’t move. I should mention that the handbrakes simply manipulate the same brake shoes that the air brakes do, just on one bogie though.
Ok ok got it thanks I guess it works the same way over here in europe at this point, didn't know that... I knew from the 8888 incident the fact that usually you wouldn't use the wagon's brake but I assumed you manually have to release them turns out I'm wrong, thanks for the info
For UK coaching stock, MK1s and MK2s etc they only have a hand brake on brake coaches, which applies the brake blocks on one of the bogies. That's one of the reasons why all the passenger trains have to have a brake coach. Once the brakes leak off on the other coaches which generally will happen within about 24 hours (sometimes less) the coaches are just left brakeless save for the hand brake in the brake coach. So the reason you can't find one is there simply isn't one.
