WATERTOWN — New York Air Brake LLC (NYAB) of Watertown announced it is working with a sister company on an “improved and innovative” brake system for passenger trains. NYAB is partnering on the product with Knorr Brake Company (KBC), which is headquartered in Westminster, Maryland. Both firms are sister companies within Munich, Germany–based Knorr-Bremse. Knorr-Bremse […]
WATERTOWN — New York Air Brake LLC (NYAB) of Watertown announced it is working with a sister company on an “improved and innovative” brake system for passenger trains.
NYAB is partnering on the product with Knorr Brake Company (KBC), which is headquartered in Westminster, Maryland. Both firms are sister companies within Munich, Germany–based Knorr-Bremse.
Knorr-Bremse specializes in braking systems and is a supplier of other “safety-critical” rail and commercial-vehicle systems.
NYAB and KBC collaborated on a product called the EE-26 brake system, which the company says is “engineered for safety, performance, uptime, and lower total cost of ownership.”
The EE-26 uses electronic closed-loop control to provide “higher reliability, real-time” diagnostic capability, and a “platform for future advancements.” Designed in compliance with an American Public Transportation Association (APTA) standard, EE-26 is “aligned with new standards being adopted by many leading railways.”
“North American passenger railcars have been equipped with the same conventional pneumatic brake control for decades,” Michael Gibbs, KBC’s deputy director of OE sales, said in a release. “Now, with adoption of electropneumatic control technology significantly increasing in North America, we’ve engineered the EE-26 brake system with the capability to handle both true pneumatic and electropneumatic control of a braking system. It’s a bridge to the future of passenger car brake control.”
About NYAB
New York Air Brake develops and supplies air-brake control systems and components, electronically controlled braking systems, foundation brakes, training simulators and train-handling systems, and wayside equipment to the rail industry.
New York Air Brake was founded in 1890 and is headquartered in Watertown. The company has 750 total employees and operates manufacturing plants in Nixa, Missouri; Riverside, Missouri; Salisbury, North Carolina; West Chicago, Illinois; and Wheatland, Missouri; along with Train Dynamic Systems (TDS), a technology development unit located in Irving, Texas.
More on the product
In a “traditional purely pneumatic system,” individual passenger-car brakes are activated in response to changes in air pressure through a control pipe that runs the length of a train. In an electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) system, the brakes respond to electronic signals sent from the locomotive.
ECP braking — widely used across the rail industries in Europe, Australia, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia — provides “increased safety, improved train-level brake performance, and better diagnostics,” NYAB and KBC said.
“We often relate the comparative communications speed of pneumatic and ECP signals through a brake system to the speed of sound versus the speed of light,” Brendan Crowley, NYAB manager of sales and systems engineering, explained. “In addition to the safety and performance enhancements of greater signal speed, ECP systems deliver real-time diagnostic information and alerts to operators and maintenance staff, which benefits train engineers and technicians, improves train handling, and decreases maintenance downtime.”
Based on NYAB’s EP-60 product line, the EE-26 brake system “represents the future” of passenger ECP braking in North America, the sister companies contend. The system increases the recommended valve overhaul period to 10 years, “more than doubling the previous four-year period,” per the release.
The EE-26’s design, the firms contend, “saves space, makes installation easier for car manufacturers, and provides more accessible maintenance compared to existing traditional pipe-mounted equipment.” Additionally, the EE-26’s integrated diagnostics technology and vehicle networking are supposed to make it easier to spot problems earlier and make repairs more quickly.
The EE-26 system has undergone a “rigorous battery of testing” at both KBC and NYAB’s laboratories and has been under continuous field trial in North America since 2014, accumulating over 1.8 million miles of service, the companies said.