About that wheel in Suffern

The car a high door CI. It lost the wheel due to the failure of the bearing. While it is disturbing that it happened, it is by no means uncommon for bearings to fail and cause serious problems. How many freight derailements have been caused by burned off bearings. The only reason that the wheel fell off is because the bearing is inboard, and so when it overheats and breaks, the wheel is allow to detatch from the axel. On freight equipment, the truck frame would drop down and begin to dig into the roadbed.

The problem is that modern sealed bearings require constant lubrication. In the event the lubricant should be lost, by any means, the bearing will quickly overheat and fail. The bearings are designed to be maintenance free, and can not be repaired. If they show signs of failure, they must be replaced. Now it may happen slowly, in which case the seepage from the bearing would be obvious to someone performing a required inspection, or it may be sudden and undetectable before total failure.

As I stated after the derailment of 3930, a bearing can go from fine to burned off in as little as 10 miles, on a train travling at 50 mph. Once the lubricant is lost, overheating occurs very quickly.

Interestingly, the CI's are the only NJT cars, after the MU's were modified, that lack smoke bombs in the bearings that will produce a great deal of smoke should the bearing overheat.

Before someone suggests it, current hot box detectors would not detect this situation. NJT passenger equipment has inboard bearings, and hot box detectors are designed to scan outboard journals. Even if the field portition of the detector were to be moved to scan inboard bearings, the disc brake discs, located on the axels, would produce false alarms due to the heat produced during braking.

There is no concivable way that a "hard coupling" could have cause a faliure of the bearing or bearing seal. The seal most likely is what failed, and could have done so due to a number of reasons. Age is lilely not a factor, as the bearings are a part of the wheel and axel assembly, and these are changed often, when wheels get out of round, and can no longer be cut on a wheel lathe for whatever reason.

Fascinating and informative Sir. You too Jt. Thanks. And I agree Jt. The mechanical forces and NJT seem to go by:

"If it's not broke don't fix it; and if it's breaking, wait 'til it's broke then fix it."

When I boarded at EWR today, the NJT customer service person handed me a Tempilstik and a pamphlet. Yikes!

Maybe the car manufacturers need to up the technology a bit and put in thermal sensing devices (a lousy 5-cent thermocouple per bearing) and add to the trainline telemetry to report defects to the crew.

Maybe NJT needs to put it in their specs for the next contract. Vendors only respond when the customer yells.

NJT can't even get PA's to trainline through the trains....I can only imagine the nightmare that would exist with a thermal sensor, every 5 minutes detecting a false indaction or loss of contact with it.....

Although I have never been witness to one go bad, as Sirsonic mentioned, the bearings in most of the fleet has "smoke bombs" in them, which release a lot of smoke when the bearing is starting to fail. I also thought that they stink too, but im not positive (as I said, I havne't not been a witness to this type of incdient yet - thank god). Its just that the C1's don't have this feature, and if it did, maybe it would have prevented the wheel from breaking off.

Gandy dancer your 5 cent thermo couple is not whats the problem. the $300 in wiring and the $100 computer to read the $0.05 thermo couple and the several $K for maintenance per car.
With bearings hidden behind wheels, its time for commuter agencies to put in Hot bearing detectors and the smoke/stink bombs in bearing adaptor. I remember when these things went off the smell lingered around a locomotive for two/three days.
Is it not curious that other than the Amtrak detector there are no hot bearing detectors on NJT or MNCR or LIRR ???
a few of the Hot bearing detectors would up the safety percentage a lot. the old standards never had electronic gadgets, they depended on the nose of conductors and trainman to detect defects, but these days the smell of toilets probably would mask the smell of a Hotbox pellet holder

Dutch, the cost of onboard sensors and reporting systems are almost always offset (capital cost amortization) over the life of the car by decreased inspection and repair costs. True in cars and planes and probably for trains as well.

In the case of NJT, it would seem that anything safety-related that offloaded responsibility from the maint staff would be a good thing, based on the comments I've seen on this forum.

Personally, I'd rather see the responsibility for making a decision about what can or cannot move over the road shifted more towards those who have to operate the equipment. (Edit: By that I meant placing more information at the crews' disposal)

Nervous passenger: "Captain, is this plane safe to fly in?"
Me: "We don't have parachutes up there, ma'am, so we're just as concerned about safety as you are."

I doubt that stationary scanning equipment would be accurate enough to detect and correctly identify a bearing problem BEFORE serious damage was done. In any event, you'd need the detectors spaced very close together (maybe every 3-5 miles) to detect a problem and stop a train before serious damage occurred from a dry bearing.

Installing and maintaining that big a system on all NJT lines might well be more expensive than the $1,000 or so per car it might cost for the onboard monitoring system. When you consider that each C5 is a multimillion dollar piece of equipment, that $1,000 is almost insignificant.

like I said the $1000 of equipment is nothing but cost of checking out the system during each inspection is. besides those thermo couples are inserted into a bearing adaptor directly on axles so each has to have wiring to bridge two sets of springs, a lot of maintenance.
hot box detectors have been very succesfull when spaced every 35 miles.
The Amtrak Genesis has Hotbox detectors and with a fleet of 200 gennies they have at least 2 major delays a week due to false alarms.

I recently had the right front wheel bearings in my car go bad, and it was loud! It basically sounded like the drone of a propeller driven aircraft as I was driving. Would there be any audible indication on a train?

A wayside hotbox detector would work, if one can be designed to work on inboard bearings. They would need only be placed every 20 miles or so to prevent most problems.

The most simple solution, and cheapest, already in use by NJT is the use of smoke bombs in the bearing itself. If the bearing overheats, it will cause a great deal of white smoke, making it quite clear to anyone with eyes that something is wrong. The problems is that the Comet I's are not equiped, even though the rest of the NJT passenger fleet has them.

As the bearing failed, it would have made a great deal of noise, however, it is possible that nobody realized that it was not a normal sound. I have never been offically told what a failing bearing sounds like, and given the great deal of other noises this equipment makes, I doubt I would suspect anything if I didnt know what to listen for.

I mean, also, wasn't nobody on this train as it was on its way to the yard?