Axel Rose?.....................
An axel caught fire, it was reported last week.
Thanks! I must have missed that.
Axel Rose?.....................
Axel F?
I was working on a contract with FRA to add ECP braking, automatic cutlevers, anglecocks, handbrakes, brake piston position, bearing temperatures, bearing vibration (+/- 80 G at 100 KHz), ride quality accelerometers (longitudinal, lateral, transverse). Auto-coupler for the air hose and ECP electrical as well. 5 cars were equipped and ready for field test from a yard in Joliet, IL. Dec 2008. On Jan 20, 2009, Obama cut the funds for the program. A car equipped with the electronics from my program would have informed the locomotive engineer and allowed a stop before catastrophic failure. Obama and the Democrats have no desire to resolve those kinds of issues. They are owned by the rail companies and unions.
Even without the better electronics from my program, the railroad maintains infrared "hot box" detectors every 20 miles. The reset to 0 on the passing of the locomotive and count axles. Anything "hot" is registered and reported by axle position.
I published two papers in 2005 on the system. One at the 10th International CAN Conference and the 2nd at the IEEE/ASME conference in Pueblo, CO a couple months later. The project was labeled Onboard Continuous Monitoring System (OBMCS). Over $1 million in project equipment was abandoned in the field in January 2009. There wasn't any money remaining to collect the assets and place them in safe storage. Some of it remains in my basement to the present day. The PC104 CPU modules have "aged out". I used a Linux kernel running C language modules for all the interfaces. Linux made a kernel coding update that employed a micro-instruction that wasn't implemented by the Diamond Systems "system on a chip" CPU, so a CPU board change was coming soon.