Advice...vacuum or airbrakes?

I can't give too much detail. Narrow Gauge, 2 miles or so long. and needs to be fully legal

 

You can buy miniature railway vac brake systems off the shelf, maybe see if they are available in a big enough size to do what you are asking?

You could speak to the Talyllyn Railway who fitted air brakes relatively recently so may be able to guide you.

 

Westinghouse air was demonstrably stronger when they did comparative trials http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_brake

 

Leighton Buzzard and Amberley both use lorry components as far as I know. LB have compressors either mounted on the loco or in a wagon or van, whereas Amberley have a static compressor at the midway point on the line, and recharge the air system every time they stop there.

 

Umm, *a* Westinghouse system was superior in a 19thC trial. Brakes had a lot of development after that. You could argue that doesn't have a lot of relevance today. That's the trouble with using Wikipedia as a source...

 

Indeed, they have supplied air brake pumps for other railways - whether they are still in the market for that I don't know.

 

Umm, Tom was discussing historical braking systems and the context in which they were used. He mentioned several properties that they had, however did not mention that the Westinghouse was stronger, so, without having the figures to back this up at hand, I googled and put in a link to where some statistics were to be found online (which by pure coincidence is wikipedia). If you would like a later source I could point you towards Dick Hardy.

I am not suggesting the OP should install an old system, nor do I understand the need for your apparently condescending manner.

 

the actual equipment I don't see a problem in.... a brake controller might be another matter

 

I think the point is that there are fundamental issues at play - air brake force is limited by pressure in the air lines, which theoretically can go as high as you like (and in practice is apparently 70–110 psi). The force from a vacuum brake cylinder if a hard vacuum was being drawn is limited to 14.7 PSI (atmospheric pressure) x piston area.

This is why vacuum brakes are necessarily so much bigger!

 

So that need presumably rules out the Clark & Webb brake.

 

it's not a 4-2-2-0 compound so yes

 

Best to talk with some NG folk, I think. The FR and WHR use vacuum, whereas the WHHR uses air. The L&BR has/is switching from air to vacuum (I think), so it might well be useful to talk to them and get the reasons behind that. The FR may well be able to provide vacuum brake equipment?

 

A certain very wealthy ex-mobile phone shop owner is seeking planning permission for a narrow gauge railway around his country pile in Staffordshire.

I wonder if he might be pondering over the air/vac issue?

 

yeah, that's not me

 

he's probably not pondering, but perhaps his consultants may be?

Mind you, if I know anything about external consultancies, if there were to be such a report then it would run to 20 pages, eight of them them "deliberately left blank" and the executive summary would be capable of being paraphrased as "pick whichever one you like", but so subtly that the client would think the consultancy was supporting his secret preference...

 

I would think the gent in question would be pondering because the consultants would have asked him just that. Standard consultancy procedure is to ask the client all the necessary questions, including what he wants; take his answers, bundle it up into a fancy report, along with lots of peripheral but unnecessary information, and give it back to the client. The conclusions reached must always recommend further work which they can undertake. Certainly run to more than 20 pages, though; with no blank ones, although the margins might be quite wide.

 

Increasing the line spacing is the schoolboy trick for English essays...

 

When I wrote my DPhil thesis (volumes that are mostly admired in a long row on a shelf, but rarely taken down and read), careful consideration was given to the weight of paper, to maximise width of spine ...

Tom

 

Didn't work in my day. We were always told to write so many words.

 

That's easy, you just lie through your teeth, they'll never count each word! As long as it fills up the right amount of space they'll presume it's there or there abouts.