Vacuum brakes

The vacuum brake is a braking system employed on trains and introduced in the mid-1860s. A variant, the automatic vacuum brake system, became almost universal in British train equipment and in countries influenced by British practice. Vacuum brakes also enjoyed a brief period of adoption in the United States, primarily on narrow-gauge railroads. Its limitations caused it to be progressively superseded by compressed air systems starting in the United Kingdom from the 1970s onward. The vacuum brake system is now obsolete; it is not in large-scale usage anywhere in the world, other than in South Africa, largely supplanted by air brakes.

In the earliest days of railways, trains were slowed or stopped by the application of manually applied brakes on the locomotive and in brake vehicles through the train, and later by steam power brakes on locomotives. This was clearly unsatisfactory, but the existing technology did not offer an improvement. A chain braking system was developed, requiring a chain to be coupled throughout the train, but it was impossible to arrange equal braking effort along the entire train.

A major advance was the adoption of a vacuum braking system, in which flexible pipes were connected between all the vehicles of the train, and brakes on each vehicle could be controlled from the locomotive. The earliest scheme was a simple vacuum brake, in which vacuum was created by operation of a valve on the locomotive; the vacuum actuated brake pistons on each vehicle, and the degree of braking could be increased or decreased by the driver. Vacuum, rather than compressed air, was preferred because steam locomotives can be fitted with ejectors; venturi devices that create vacuum without moving parts.

The simple vacuum system had the major defect that in the event of one of the hoses connecting the vehicles becoming displaced (by the train accidentally dividing, or by careless coupling of the hoses, or otherwise) the vacuum brake on the entire train was useless.

The automatic vacuum brake had been developed: it was designed to apply fully if the train becomes divided or if a hose becomes displaced, but opposition on the grounds of cost (particularly by the LNWR and its chairman Richard Moon) to the fitting of the automatic type of brake meant that it took a serious accident at Armagh in 1889 before legislation compelled the automatic system. In this accident at Armagh, a portion of a train was detached from the locomotive on a steep gradient and ran away, killing 80 people. The train was fitted with the simple vacuum brake, which was useless on the disconnected portion of the train. It was clear that if the vehicles had been fitted with an automatic continuous brake, the accident would almost certainly not have happened, and the public concern at the scale of the accident prompted legislation mandating the use of a continuous automatic brake on all passenger trains.

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Wikipedia