What keeps a train on the track?

BoreMeScience · 190.7K views · 2009-09-22 · 2:27

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Overview

A short clip of Richard Feynman explaining how a train stays on its tracks, through the conical shape of wheels and how it handles curves without differentials.

On Hacker News

HN links it as a great, surprising explanation whenever rail wheels, gauge or curves come up.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2019–2022

Topics

Fundamental physics Transit, cities & urban planning Mechanical & precision engineering

What people said

frosted-flakes · 2020-06 · Recommendation
> unlike the cylindrical profile which again just steers with the flange basically rubbing against the edge of the railhead. That's crazy. That means that the wheels are actually slipping when going around a corner, because the wheels are all the same diameter. Unlike conical wheels, which are essentially self-steering. Here's a great explanation by Richard Feynman: [VIDEO] How could the BART trains possibly have cylindrical wheels? Conical wheels have been used on trains for ages, so that's seems weird. But doing some research, it seems that, yes, they were cylindrical: > Queensland Railways, for its first hundred years, used cylindrical wheels and vertical rails. With non-inclined rails and cylindrical wheels, the wheel squeal from trains taking curves on that railway was slight. After adopting coned wheels and inclined rails from the mid 1980s, the wheel squeal from trains curving at the same location and at the same speed decreased immensely. Some modern systems, such as Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) in San Francisco, use cylindrical wheels and flat-topped rails; BART is now switching to conical tread to reduce the noise caused by flange/rail contact and loss of adhesion of one of the wheels on curves. -- [LINK]
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texaslonghorn5 · 2022-07 · Reference
[VIDEO] (video of Feynman explaining how trains stay on the track) Is this it? I found it in my YouTube history. Or this one, which superimposes free body diagram (of forces) on the wheels to show how it is self stabilizing? [LINK]
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JackFr · 2019-06 · Reference
Snopes rates it as partly true, and the author is a pedantic killjoy. It is broadly true that for 2000 years European vehicles matched their roads and adapting existing vehicles to new technology led to using axles that were the same size. Do other gauges exist? Of course. Are the true elements of this worth repeating? Sure. As an unrelated aside here’s Richard Feynman explaining why train axles don’t need differentials. [VIDEO]
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Sources

Video by BoreMeScience, played through YouTube.

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