And they're gonna need more than just a new knuckle!
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| Posted by on January 28, 2010 | |
Well done...
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Better pull the tapes on that one...
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Suffering from fatigue?I know the feeling.
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I can't see any rusting in the break that would indicate prior minor cracking, so there was a lot of force exerted here. As Joe said they had better have a look at their tapes.
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Based upon the colour and dullness of the metal, it would indicate a cold brittle failure of the steel. How cold was it?
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I. L. Leavens, Late January, in Superior, Wisconson....about 90 below zero...
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Looks like a CAD drawing section view. Surprising how little metal is in there.
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Wow. That's all I can come up with is "Wow."
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It was about -10 F. There is a prior crack that you can not see in this photo, and has rust spots in at least 3 places. It was caused by stopping after a kick, with a about ten loads behind 30 cushioned draw bars. They can download my tapes if they want.
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In looking at the "big picture", it appears the coupler has recently had some work done to it.
Was it recently replaced?
Or ???
As the cotter pin and draft key lock look new ?
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The knuckle is the designed weak point, if that breaks you can throw the engineer under the bus. If anything else breaks, such as this, you can't blame the hogger. That's the way one old engineer explained it to me when we had to go get the rear half of a train that had a coupler break in almost the exact same way
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