rear disk brakes

Could be:

dragging equipment...this can get out of control before the engineer, 30 cars up front, knows anything is wrong.

engineers throwing butts out the window (as someone suggested)

Kids playing with matches along the tracks

sparks from the brakes or wheels against the rail or wheel flanges against the rail on curves (bad track)...they may well through sparks, but they don't catch fire themselves.

There is some pretty poor freight track in the area South and West of Portland on the short lines.

Occasionly, a poorly maintained diesel locomotive will spit fire out the stacks, but I don't know that it would through sparks!

You should see what happens when they run a coal fired steam locomotive along track that hasn't seen steam in 50 years. As the cinders fly onto ground that hasn't burned in all that time, a bevy of firefighters has to follow the train! Note that virtually all of the restored steam on the West Coast is oil fired, as it was since about 1900.

Regards,

DAve

I think disc brakes on trains are comparatively recent ; older stuff here does use the tread brakes you describe.

Dave Milne, Scotland '91 Grand Wag>

jbjeep did pass the time by typing:

I know. Just being my usual self. ^_^

Probably from dragging stuff or wheel/brake sparks. Under normal use the wheels get very hot. Never seen an axle sieze but if it did that would drag steel on steel and make one hell of a lot of sparks.

^^^^ that's the #1 cause around here.

Most of this area is flatlandia so the trains don't brake so drasticly. I'd suspect areas with steeper grades that wheels/brakes sparking could be a real problem.

That is usually caused by the wheel to track joint.

When wheel bearings go on them, they can shoot sparks out the bearing itself or they seize the wheels up causing them to drag along the tracks shooting mega sparks.

A brake can seize on causing the same thing too.

That is/was one of the big issues when they canceled the conductors in the caboose back in the 80's up here in Canada. These guys actually sat up top watching for stuff like that, now a heat sensor in the train station 'looks' at wheels as they go on by.

Mike

86/00 CJ7 Laredo, 33x9.5 BFG Muds, 'glass nose to tail in '00 88 Cherokee 235 BFG AT's

jbjeep wrote:

Well, I suppose they are tread brakes in a sort of way ; they bear on the side of the wheel ( the y axis ) not the z axis. Perhaps the traditional sort caused flat spots on the wheel which were more difficult to machine out. I'm guessing.