Excerpt from The Air-Brake: A Practical Presentation of the Modern Developments of the Air-Brake for Steam and Electric Railroad Trains When George Westinghouse in 1869 invented the air-brake and thereby enormously increased the possibilities of control of railroad trains, he removed one of the most effective bars to high speed and freedom from accident for rapidly moving carriers. Lack of positive and reliable control leads always to destructive results, and therefore the railroads have been untiring in their efforts to stimulate the perfection of the air-brake as one of their most important appliances. Many roads at once adopted the device although it was still far from perfect. Three years later, the inventor added the triple valve, a distinct advance in reliability and facility of operation, and all of the systems which have survived are based on a variation of this method of action. Within the comparatively short period of twenty-five years, the application of the air-brake even to freight cars has become well-nigh universal, resulting in a much more expeditious handling of freight and in a greater safety to life and property. The present work is designed to emphasize the practical elements of design and construction, giving particularly the details of the Westinghouse and New York systems as applied to railroad equipment; a short presentation is also given of the air-brake as applied to electric cars. As the material was written especially for the correspondence courses of the American School, it should appeal both to the trained man who desires accurate information, and to those readers who are only interested in keeping up with the world's progress along technical lines. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.