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3 Axle Streetcars Volume 2 Robinson to Rathgeber Elsner Soft Cover
3 Axle Streetcars Volume 2 Robinson to Rathgeber By Henry Elsner
Soft Cover #0507?/1000
Copyright 1995
Soft Cover
This study surveys the history and technology of the 3-axle steering or "radial" electric streetcar.
The 3-axle car was developed in response to a fundamental problem of rail vehicles: the friction between wheel-flange and rail-head on curves. The solution described in the following pages is appealingly simple in concept: three axles, flexibly connected to each other, would automatically assume the minimum-friction radial position on curves and then realign themselves correctly when traversing straight track. Or so the theory goes.
Attempts to put this theory into practice had been made sporadically on European railroads throughout the 19th century. The first application of the linked 3-axle concept to electric street railways was carried out in the United States in 1889 by William Robinson, a prominent inventor of railroad signal systems.
The Robinson radial truck is usually referred to as a brief, failed experiment. As documented in this study, it was in fact manufactured for about a dozen years and purchased by a score of traction systems. A number of the Robinson radials were in service for nearly twenty years, and a few lasted even longer.
In Europe, after some false starts made about the time of Robinson's final years of production, the principle was again revived in the 1920s. Several inventors and manufacturers were involved in this renaissance of the 3-axle truck. Street-railway and interurban cars equipped with it were sprinkled across Europe by the mid 1930s; fleets of them were to serve over the next several decades in more than a half dozen cities. Significant numbers remain in use today as two-car trains in Munich, as trailers in Basel, and as unique 5-axle articulated units in Augsburg. Scattered others can also be found elsewhere in passenger service, as utility cars, or in historical collections.
The following pages provide the first complete description of the development and use of steering 3-axle electric cars - from Robinson's sample for Boston in 1889 to the more than 500 built for Munich by the Joseph Rathgeber company in the 1950s and 1960s. Photographs and scale drawings of a variety of cars and trucks built by American and European manufacturers are included. A concluding discussion, from the viewpoint of an interested layman, covers the principles and problems of the major designs, and evaluates the role of the 3-axle car in the family of rail transit vehicles. (Some readers may wish to skip this section, turning directly to the Conclusions, beginning on page 321.)
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